


The Earth, the Moon, and the Machine

by telm_393



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Ableism, Autism Spectrum, Character Study, Chronic Illness, Developing Friendships, F/M, Falling In Love, Family Issues, Food Issues, Friendship, Gen, Hypochondria, Implied/Referenced Eating Disorders, Major Illness, Medical Professionals, Mental Health Issues, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Panic Attacks, Parent-Child Relationship, Step-siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-26
Updated: 2015-09-26
Packaged: 2018-04-23 10:42:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4873759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is wide and beautiful (and threatening and baffling) and Chris Traeger runs, does his best not to hide, and hides a lot anyway. Things have always been more complicated than he wants them to be, but that’s life, and Chris is determined to enjoy it.</p><p>[Chris Traeger, in ten vignettes.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Earth, the Moon, and the Machine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aposiopesis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aposiopesis/gifts).



> This story deals with a lot of issues, and I think they're mostly enumerated in the tags. Just know that there's a lot of talk about death and about the looming threat of death, but there isn't any actual death.

**Code Red**

Chris is looking at himself in the mirror of the bathroom that's connected to his shared hospital room. He’s standing on his tiptoes on top of the step stool in front of the sink because he’s still little, but he has something important to say, and someone important to say it to.

He says, “My name is Chris Traeger, and I’m going to live forever.”

Chris is telling himself this because he’s the only one that believes it, and he knows it’s something he can never, ever forget.

Chris is six years old.

Actually, he’s six years, two months, and twenty-three days old.

He was supposed to die approximately three weeks after he was born. He doesn’t know this because someone told him, he just knows this because he’s overheard doctors telling med students or interns or whoever’s following him or her around that day about him.

_Christopher Traeger is a particularly interesting case. He had an estimated three weeks to live, but he’s six years old now._

No.

He’s six years, two months, and twenty-three days old.

That’s approximately 324 weeks old.

That’s literally 108 times as many weeks as he was supposed to live.

Chris thinks that doctors are very pessimistic. He looks around the children’s hospital and sees all sorts of kids who are doing all sorts of living and dying, and he doesn’t think they’re going to go away as soon as the doctors say they will. Chris is, his mommy says, an _incurable optimist._

Those words put together make Chris giggle and flap his hands, because optimism (noun, hopefulness or confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something) isn’t a sickness, so there’s no reason to use the word incurable (noun, a person who cannot be cured) about it. Optimism is positivity, and positivity means knowing life is happy and that things will turn out great, and that’s good, so it’s actually really excellent that Chris is an _incurable optimist_ because he thinks it would be very bad if he got cured of optimism like they’re trying to cure his sick blood.

Chris rocks back and forth on his heels and the step stool makes little squeaky noises under his bare feet. He’s still small, smaller than he’s supposed to be. He reaches out and runs his fingers over the face in the mirror, over the purple bruise-patches on its left cheek ( _you could cut glass on those cheekbones,_ Katie Evans the acute lymphoblastic leukemia patient’s mommy says, and Chris doesn’t know what she means by that because he’s very sure it’s not true because glass would cut him, not the other way around, he understands that) and its forehead.

He’s got a few more bruise-patches on his wrists and arms and ankles. Some of them are smooth and some of them are sort of raised little islands on his skin, and then there are a bunch of little red dots covering his body. They’re kind of like freckles, except they don’t look much like freckles because they’re not, they’re from all the bleeding inside of his body.

Chris points at himself, makes those little finger guns that Keith Nolan the Hodgkin’s lymphoma patient always liked making. Keith would make them when he saw people and then he’d smile. Chris liked those finger guns too, he guesses, because he does them a lot now when he says people’s names. They help him remember names and they’re fun, so that makes them just about perfect.

“Chris Traeger,” he says again, and a smile bursts across his face, wide and bright, because yes, that’s his name.

Chris likes names. He likes how there’s lots of names that can be the same but they’re still different. Even if every single person in the world was named Chris, it would still be his name and Chris would be their name too because they’d all be different people and they’d all say the name differently and it'd mean different things to everyone, some people might not like being named Chris, but Chris likes his name.

Christopher Traeger.

There are eleven letters in his first name and seven letters in his last name.

So that’s eighteen letters all together, except not really, because Chris doesn’t go by Christopher and he never has, not ever, he’s _Chris_.

Four letters.

Add four letters to seven, that makes eleven, exactly as many letters as his full first name when it’s all by itself.

Chris Traeger is made out of eleven letters and muscles and sinew and red blood cells and white blood cells and a low platelet count and blue eyes and thinning brown hair and purple bruise-patches and red pinpricks on his old-book-yellow skin and bright white teeth and the way his vocal cords vibrate at his eagle-flight laughter and the way his head gets light when he spins around and around and around and the way he bounces when he’s happy and rocks back and forth when he’s not and his resting heart rate of one hundred and ten beats per minute.

Chris Traeger is made out of all of these things and all of the other things on the inside and outside of his body, his heart going thump thump thump and sending all of this blood around him, his blood and also the blood from the plastic bags.

Secretly he knows his mommy and daddy are sad because they thought he was all better from the blood disease he had when he was a baby until he was four and it came back and then he got all better again and now he’s six (six years, two months, twenty three days) and a couple of months ago it came back again, and Chris knows his mommy and daddy don’t think he’s going to leave the hospital this time, but they’re wrong.

His body is stronger than his disease, than the long name he pushes out of his mind.

(Three words, thirty three letters in all.)

He’s already a miracle, everyone calls him a miracle because he’s survived so long, so why can’t he be a miracle again?

He’s going to get better.

He says this to his mommy and daddy and they cry, so he’s not sure if they believe him or if they think he’s just being brave, he and the other kids are always being called brave, and that’s funny because Chris knows he and the other kids are scared all the time, scared of the things in their body that want to eat them up, scared of dying, the word that the grown-ups don’t say around them even though it’s a word they all know, Santa Muerte (that’s what Francesca Vallejo calls it) hanging around their playroom.

Chris runs down the halls of the children’s hospital, runs and jumps and spins and falls and breathes too fast and feels his heart race and hears the grown-ups tell him not to move so much, please, Chris, come on, but Chris _has_ to move. He has to move so that he can survive. (Survive, verb, continue to live or exist, especially in spite of danger or hardship.) He has to run so that he can stay. He has to move so that he can keep smiling and laughing and being brave.

Because if he doesn’t move his brain goes funny and sad and scared scared scared and he cries and runs away to inside of himself, which is no good.

Chris will do anything to keep from being unhappy, and he’ll do anything to keep other people from being unhappy too.

But sometimes he can’t help it. Sometimes even when he knows he’s going to have a body that is good one day he still can’t help the unhappy feelings, or what he thinks count as unhappy feelings because they burn his body like a fever (except that might just be the fever, he always has a fever) and make his stomach hurt and make his heart go all small and crushed.

(But maybe that’s because he’s sick, he’s always sick. Really, literally always sick.)

Chris is feeling tired now, and he’s swaying on his feet and it’s sort of hard to breathe and his whole entire body is getting all shaky like pineapple Jello and his head is hurting and he was telling himself he’s going to live forever and get better but suddenly everything starts lifting up in a bad way, like he can’t keep himself solid, and he feels mad and sad because he was being positive but now his stupid body is making it all _hard._

And he’s looking at himself and his heart is doing the small crushed thing and he doesn’t want that but he can’t stop it, he can’t stop any of this, and he shouldn’t get mad, he doesn’t want to get mad, he doesn’t like that, but everything has stopped lifting and started falling and his brain is falling too, everything is going down like an avalanche and he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t like change, but he wants this sickness to change because it happens too fast and everything in his life has gone all sideways because of it and he’s in the hospital and he doesn’t want to be, he wants to be at _home_ , he wants to be in his house, wants to have his own place instead of this building of people who come and go.

Come and go come and go come and go, Chris likes it when things are the _same_ , when he knows who’s going to be around, when his friends don’t Code Blue in the middle of the night and disappear forever.

Chris is trying so hard to be happy, trying so hard to be positive, he doesn’t want to be cured of his optimism, he doesn’t, but he’s trying so hard and all of these numbers are running through his head and everything’s breaking down and the beeping from the machines outside and the doctors and nurses going around and the other children screaming and laughing and crying, it's all so loud, things are always loud but this is worse, everything is all pushed into his brain and body at the same time.

Chris isn’t smiling anymore and his face feels empty without it and his breath is all fast and nervous and he tells himself, “Stop. Stop, stop, stop. Go away, purple. Go away, red. Go away, extra heartbeat.” He bangs his hands on the edge of the sink and starts crying. “Stop!” he screams. “Go away, go away, go away! Come back, make the blood come back! Stop it, stop it, stop it!”

He’s rocking back and forth on his feet with his hands still on the sink, holding him up, because he’s going to get better but he wants it to happen _now_ and it’s stupid, stupid, stupid that just a little while ago he was smiling, he was smiling and okay, but now he’s getting older second by second and minute by minute and he’s still here and he’s still sick.

He doesn’t want to get better. He doesn’t want to get better, he wants to _be_ better. He wants his body to stop going downhill, he wants his condition to stop _deteriorating._ He wants to not be afraid.

He wants to run without people telling him don’t, don’t, don’t. He wants to be healthy.

He wants to be the healthiest person in the world.

He wants to run miles and miles and miles and not even sweat.

“Stop!” he screams again, at his body, at his brain, at everything, and he’s so tired and his whole body feels like it’s turning to liquid and he falls from the step stool and hits the floor and curls up and hits his head against the white tiles because his head already hurts so he doesn’t think it’ll do anything and he likes the movement, he likes his head going up and down, the way that the floor feels solid, the opposite of how he feels.

“Stop,” he sobs as someone crouches next to him and touches him and he shrieks because it feels like the tip of a needle in his arm. “Stop!” he screams, and he wants to talk to the mirror again, to the face in the mirror. He’s handsome. He’s supposed to be handsome, at least, but he doesn’t think anyone can see that now, not with the purple, not with the red. No _fair_.

Chris is a miracle but he wishes he wasn’t because it turns out that to be a miracle everything has to be terrible first.

He’s screaming without any words now, and he’s too tired to keep banging his head or rocking back and forth, and he’s picked up and they must take him back to bed because that’s where he wakes up.

His head hurts.

It _hurts_ , and things get worse and worse and Chris spends most of his time asleep or only sort of conscious until the grown-ups decide to do something. They decide that he’s going to have surgery, and that’s scary because Chris knows so many people who went in for surgery and never came out, and he knows there’s a percentage attached to him: 20%. He doesn’t know what the percentage is for, but he’s heard it said over and over again while he was half-conscious. He has a bad feeling about it.

Before he goes into surgery he starts screaming and flailing even though he hasn’t even had the strength to get out of bed for a week, but he passes out before they even sedate him, and he wakes up in the operating room staring up at a surgeon.

Chris tries to scream but he just mumbles, and then there’s a thing over his face and he breathes in something sticky and sweet.

Then there’s a voice telling him to wake up, and then—

Everything sort of weaves together, makes itself into this tangled string he can’t touch, and really, it’s two weeks later that he starts happening again. The doctors and nurses say it was touch and go for a while, but they think Chris has a good chance of recovering from his surgery and from his sickness.

And two months later the doctors say that Chris isn’t sick anymore.

That means the disorder is gone again, hidden inside of him, but if it doesn’t come back it’ll be the same as gone forever, and that’s good, because it’s not going to come back.

Chris isn’t sick anymore, and he laughs and laughs and laughs, bounces and spins and flaps his hands and thinks that it was silly to get so upset all those times when he knew that this moment would come.

Chris is healthy.

He’s healthy, he’s all better, and he’s never going to get sick again and the purple bruise-patches will fade away and the red too because his blood is staying together instead of bursting apart under his skin.

He’s a winner, and now the rest of his life is in front of him, going on and on, and he’s excited.

“I’m going to like it,” he tells his mommy and daddy. “I’m going to like it, because I’ve already liked it, but now I’ll like it even more.”

“Wait, what are you going to like, sweetie?” his mommy asks, and Chris giggles because the answer should be obvious.

“Being alive.”

His daddy laughs, a sound that’s musical and free, and grabs Chris and swings him around while Chris shrieks with laughter.

“Someday,” his daddy says, “you’re going to climb Mount Everest just like your old man.”

**Of a Distinct or Particular Character**

Chris is special, and this is important because everybody says it all the time. His mommy says it, his daddy says it, and eventually, after his daddy leaves, his stepfather Gavin Morris says it.

His teachers say it a lot too. Maybe the most out of everyone. People’s voices sometimes sound funny when they say that word too. _Special._ His parents sometimes say it like they say _sorry_ and his teachers sometimes say it in this high-pitched voice like they’re talking to a dog.

_Chris is a very special boy._

He always thought people said it so much because he was a miracle, but then he gets better and no one can tell he’s been sick and still goes to the doctor all the time and people keep saying ‘special’ with something in their voice that Chris doesn’t understand. It can’t be bad, though, because ‘special’ isn’t a bad word, it’s a good one, it means Chris is “of a distinct or particular character”, which probably means something good, or at least not-bad. It just means he’s different (people call him different all the time), which is the same as extraordinary.

Chris starts kindergarten when he’s seven (that is, seven years, six months, and fourteen days), so he’s older than a lot of the other kids, who are mostly five, but he’s so small that they don’t notice.

He thinks they like him. They laugh a lot when they’re around him, which is definitely good even though most of the time he doesn’t know what they’re laughing at so he just laughs too, and they like racing him because he always wins and he guesses they like competing against him so that they can try to beat him. Chris is the one who laughs at that because nobody’s going to beat him, he’s great at running. He never even breaks a sweat, not anymore. The doctors say it’s incredible that he only recently went into remission and is so healthy.

“It’s because I know everything about being healthy,” Chris says proudly. “I read about it all the time. I know all the vitamins and I know all the things that have quinine so I can avoid them!”

“That’s great, Chris,” his blood doctor says. “Keep taking care of yourself like this. You really are a miracle.”

Chris beams.

He’s a miracle, so he decides he should act like one, and then, when he realizes he’s not sure how a miracle acts, he just decides to be the best person he can be.

Chris might be old for kindergarten (but not _too_ old) but he’s good at school.

As time goes on, he continues being good at school. He gets excellent grades.

He’s phenomenal (adjective, highly extraordinary or prodigious; exceptional) at math and amazing at reading. He has some problems with school things, though, and they bother him. He has trouble controlling his hands sometimes, like when he cuts stuff with the scissors and when he writes with a pen or pencil or colors or something. His teachers say he’s a really good student, he’s so special, but he needs to work on his penmanship and reading comprehension.

The penmanship part is true but the reading part is silly because Chris honest to God is great at reading. Chris learned how to read words before he was two, and when he was two he could already read the dictionary and spell perfectly. Still, apparently just because he can’t explain stuff he’s read so well his reading _comprehension_ isn’t very good. But Chris also reads really, really fast. Literally _way_ faster than anybody else in his class, even faster his his kindergarten teacher.

And that continues. Chris doesn’t meet anyone who can read faster than him or remember as much stuff as him for his entire school career.

But it's true that when Chris starts reading fiction books and stuff in English class as he gets older and there aren’t nearly as many pictures, he only gets B’s or A minuses, which bothers him. He reads and reads and reads, and he can repeat every single word of whatever he’s read out loud or on paper but he doesn’t really know why the characters do what they do or what all the symbolism means or anything like that.

It’s all just colors or plants or something, and colors are colors and plants are plants and when people say things they are saying things, it’s not like there has to be anything _inside_ of those words. Chris knows that in the real world this happens, the people not saying what they really mean, but he’s bemused when people do it in books too, maybe even more than he is when it’s done in real life, because he doesn’t understand why books wouldn’t be more simple than real life. After all, _people_ were the ones that wrote them. Didn’t they want to understand their books?

Chris shrugs it off and he studies the fiction he’s supposed to read and the explanations he’s given by Cliffs Notes or the teacher and even though he doesn’t really understand the alleged clarifications he just takes it all at face value and writes essays about them and gets perfectly adequate grades.

(That’s how it goes for any English class he ever has to take, really.)

And no matter what, Chris is special.

Special, special, special, all the time. Chris doesn’t know why people use that word so much, that and “different”. He thinks that they should try to expand their vocabulary. They’re grown-ups, they should know more descriptors. But he is still sure it can’t be a bad thing, he can’t think of any negative connotation for a word that fits so well in his mouth.

Chris is twelve years old and in fifth grade when he realizes that, actually, he was very wrong about the lack of negative connotations of ‘special’, which is kind of a blow because he doesn’t like being wrong, he’s not supposed to be wrong because that’s not a thing that winners are. Still, there’s a moment when it hits him: he’s special because people think there’s something wrong with him. That’s why he’s not like everyone else. That’s why the other kids laugh at him.

Because one day Chris is sitting at a lunch table with a bunch of his friends and he’s excited because a lot of the time he’s not able to sit at lunch tables with other people because everyone says they’re having really important private conversations or there are people who are going to come over soon or their imaginary friends are with them so there’s no space left for him. Today, though, Nellie Walters told him that actually, her imaginary friend was home sick so he should sit with her, and all her friends had groaned but Chris doesn’t know why so he didn’t think about it.

Chris is talking about vitamin D because he thinks everybody should know about how interesting and important it is when Harriet Beyer says, “Geez, Chris, you sure talk a lot, don’t you?” and smiles.

Everyone at the table laughs and Chris laughs too because they’re laughing and says, “Yeah, I do!”

Then everyone laughs again and Chris just keeps smiling because if he smiles through everything no one will be able to tell exactly how confused he is all the time.

“Don’t you ever think it might be annoying?” Harriet asks.

Chris tilts his head to the left, still smiling. If he smiles he’s happy. “What?”

“I mean, you spend lots of time talking about all sorts of things. I mean, Kev told me yesterday you talked to him about, like…numbers for a million years.”

“That’s not true, because there’s no way a million years passed in that time, and I was talking about exponents,” Chris says, flapping his hands. “They’re fascinating, and I thought he’d like to know about them because they’re cool.”

There are little laughs all around the table and some kids roll their eyes. Chris keeps smiling. If he smiles he’s happy. He looks at Nellie, and she’s kind of hunched in on herself, which can’t be good for her posture, and she’s looking down and he doesn’t know her expression but it looks kind of like ‘sad’ does. She’s not saying anything, though.

“Chris, it’s not cool,” Aaron Jackson says. “Like, it’s boring.”

“No, it’s not!” Chris says as his smile gets bigger because he feels weird but he can’t stop smiling, it’s just what his face does. “It can’t be, because it’s…it’s _mega_ cool!”

“After a while you’re sorta just talking static.”

“…I…” Chris says, because he doesn’t actually know what to say, which is strange because he usually has things to say, it’s just that sometimes in these situations he gets really thrown off.

“Come on, guys,” Kathy James says, smiling a funny little smile and staring right at Chris, “you know he’s special.”

Chris sighs in relief, because that’s a nice word, one he understands. He grins. “Thank you!”

Everyone laughs.

Everyone laughs _hard_ , except Nellie, who has her head in her hands. They laugh and Chris realizes that they’re laughing at him saying ‘thank you’ even though it wasn’t funny, and they were laughing at him saying ‘thank you’ to being called ‘special’, which means that he wasn’t being complimented because saying ‘thank you’ to a compliment is being polite, not humorous in any way.

And that’s when Chris realizes that the reason people say he’s special in a way that feels strange sometimes and the reason that the other kids snicker when they call him that or when they hear him called that or when he calls _himself_ that is because it’s not a good thing.

Not really.

‘Special’ means separate. It means freakish. It’s the same thing as being called a spaz by the other kids even though he didn’t realize that they meant it in a mean way. He thought people just teased each other because they were friends. He didn’t know they were being mean.

Chris isn’t smiling anymore, and he gets up from the table and runs away.

Laughter follows him and he hears a muttered, ‘retard’.

He locks himself in a stall in the boy’s bathroom and cries and cries and cries, because that’s what being special means.

It means he’s a retard, even though he doesn’t know how or why.

He’s different, and that’s not good. That’s why he doesn’t understand things very fast, why sometimes the things that people say don’t make much sense to him, why his mom and dad apologize for him so much even though he doesn’t know what he’s doing wrong, why the other kids laugh at him.

Chris leaves school and spends the rest of the day walking around town and then running out to one of the parks near his house and running his hands over the rough bark of the trees and trying really hard not to cry because he doesn’t like crying, he doesn’t like being sad, he doesn’t like that the kids at school weren’t nice to him even when he was nice to them.

He wishes he didn’t know that they weren’t being nice back.

It’s easier when he doesn’t know someone’s being mean, even though sometimes he figures it out a long time later and that’s not good either, it makes his stomach hurt.

He runs out of the park and then he finds a trail, maybe one he’s run on before or one he hasn’t, he’s not sure, and then he keeps running and running and running because it’s what his body’s doing, it’s what his legs are doing, and his footfalls sound reassuring in his ears, and that’s all he is right now, the sweat on his forehead and his heart beating hard and fast against his chest and his feet thumping on the ground. Move, move, move.

It’s dark out and Chris is still running because he doesn’t mind the dark and neither does his body.

There’s yelling somewhere. Someone’s yelling his name and there’s lights between the trees and actually there’s more than one somebody yelling his name. Chris shrugs it off and keeps running because he doesn’t feel like stopping and neither do his legs or muscles or blood. His whole entire body is throbbing with his heartbeat and his breath is wheezing in and out of his lungs, the air has gotten thinner, and his stomach lurches and burns, and the world is swirling around and around and around.

When Chris wakes up in the hospital, not because his disease is back or something but because he _made_ himself sick because he ran for too long and didn’t drink water, he watches his mother cry for twenty minutes before he starts crying too.

The doctors say he doesn’t know his body’s limits, and they have no idea why, they can’t figure out any medical reason for it, especially considering how sick he was just a few years ago.

Chris knows why they can’t find anything wrong.

It’s because he _does_ know his body’s limits.

He knows because his body stops working when it reaches them.

Easy.

Chris starts drinking more water and taking more supplements, and it’s all good.

**Don’t Forget About the Tin Man’s Heart**

One of the first things that Chris does when he gets to junior high is join track.

It makes sense. He’ll love track, because if he does the long distance part and he _knows_ they’ll want him to do that, it’s all about running, and running is the best thing in the whole entire world, not including all of the other best things in the whole entire world, like math and outer space.

Chris runs everywhere.

He likes moving all the time, he moves no matter what he’s doing, and sometimes his teachers say he’s ‘fidgety’, but he’s not, because that doesn’t seem to be a good thing, but moving in class helps Chris so he can focus better. He can’t focus when he’s not moving, because it’s the movement that makes things less confusing and overwhelming and makes his thoughts stop going in every direction at once and it’s just a _good thing._ In some way that Chris can’t quite quantify, it is a good thing.

Even just tapping a pen or bouncing his leg or rubbing his fingers together or squeezing a rubber ball in one hand is enough a lot of the time to let him get through class without being disruptive.

And track turns out to be the excellent idea he thought it would be, because he can do exactly what he always does, except people don’t think he’s weird for it.

They think he’s _great._

Chris is a winner, and he proves this over and over and over again by, quite simply, winning. He wins every single track meet he goes to. Every single one, no matter what. A lot of the time the grown ups even have to stop him once he gets past the finish line because he forgets that he’s not supposed to keep running, that that’s not how the competition works.

Chris will always insist that everyone’s a winner, because everybody always wins at _something_ , there’s always something people are really amazing at because people are amazing by virtue of being people.

Everyone’s a winner, but Chris is really, really happy that he gets trophies for it.

He likes trophies. They’re shiny and they make people smile at him and they make people cheer and his teammates pat him on the back and the principal congratulate him for his ‘winning streak’ (first place in every single track meet he runs in junior high) over the intercom.

It’s good, because this means that the other kids like him without even knowing him and he can be popular because he’s the star of the track team and stars are popular, so people talk to him in the halls and they smile at him and they invite him to sit with them at lunch.

Chris doesn’t talk about the things he wants to talk about when he’s being social. When he’s spontaneous about things he starts making everyone laugh at him again, and that scares him. He doesn’t want to be that way, he doesn’t want to be the kind of kid people laugh at. He does always insist on being nice to everyone, and defends the people that get made fun of, because it’s not nice to make fun of them, and besides, they’re all amazing.

He knows a lot of the kids he hangs out with are mean, but he’s sure there’s more to them than that. There has to be, and besides, Chris is making a good decision, spending time with them. He just wants people to like him, so he runs and he laughs when everyone else laughs and he smiles and says the kind of things the other kids say, talks about the kind of things they talk about and pretends to understand their conversations about situation comedies and sports he doesn’t play or understand.

So everything is phenomenal, except as time goes on and his parents break up and Chris gets to high school, he becomes a robot.

Well, not really, but he starts noticing exactly how often people compare him to machines, and more importantly, he stops shrugging it off, assuming that because he doesn’t understand it, it’s just one of those inside jokes other people have. After a while, though, he realizes that though he really _isn’t_ a robot, there’s no way he could be because he was _born_ and he’s flesh and blood just like everybody else, people don’t call him a robot (or computer or bionic man or cyborg) as an insult or a joke.

If he looks at it the right way, it’s even a compliment.

His body and athleticism and physical attractiveness (because as time goes on, Chris realizes he really is handsome, and he always uses it to his advantage because it would be silly not to) have become so impressive that he can no longer be considered a simple flesh and blood human. That’s good. His girlfriends in high school like calling him that, and he realizes eventually that some of that is about his _stamina_ (which is a euphemism that means he’s really good at sex and can keep doing it for a long time), which is also good.

Chris gets a reputation at school.

Well, no, he doesn’t. “A reputation” implies that he only gets _one_ reputation, and technically he gets several reputations.

The most important one, he thinks, is the reputation he gets for being a track star, for leading the team to victory in the long distance race every single year he runs.

He also gets a reputation as a person who has a body that “just won’t quit”. He’s not entirely sure what that means, but he’s relatively sure it’s got either something to do with his attractiveness, which is good, or the fact that his body’s limits are scientifically improbable, which is _excellent_.

Then comes his reputation as a nice person. People say that he has a great personality. That he’s intense, but “like really nice, though”. They say he’s a “good guy”. Over and over and over again, people say he’s a good guy, and Chris is thrilled. That’s what he’s always wanted—to be a good person, to be a person who improves the world by existing in it, to be a person who is worth something because he worked so hard to just survive, it doesn’t make any sense for him to not be amazing in every single way.

So in junior high and high school Chris does exactly what he’s always wanted to: he becomes someone people like. He becomes friends with everybody, even if he doesn’t hang out with people one on one. It’s because everyone’s so busy. He doesn’t know what they’re all doing, but there’s always something going on whenever he asks if someone wants to spend some time with him, except if they’re a girl and they turn out to be interested in him.

Lots of girls turn out to be interested in him, so at least he can spend time with them. He thinks the world of each and every one of them because they’re delightful, even the ones who objectively aren’t and who he doesn’t like to think about. He adores dates, because it’s just so fun, getting the chance to know people and talking to them—he especially likes it when they talk to him, sometimes it’s good to hear something that’s not the sound of his own voice—and making them happy, making them laugh, learning new things about them. It’s easier with people he’s dating because it’s a measured situation, it’s one he can control and manipulate, one he can prepare for. It’s the same with every girl, after all, except for the fact that every girl is a different person.

Chris has a lovely time with the girls he dates, but after a while he gets confused and anxious and nauseous around the girls he goes out with that he starts liking in ways that are alarmingly beyond fun and intimate and into actively romantic, and decides that he should step away before he goes and falls in love with them. The thing is, Chris absolutely adores everyone in the world a great deal and _is_ pretty much in actual love with the whole entire universe, so he thinks that _falling in love_ with another human being (or another robot person, because they’d probably get along better just by virtue of being the same species) might literally make him explode.

So he’s got to be super, super careful because he really wants to fall in love. He knows his life won’t be complete if that doesn’t happen, his life won’t be what it’s supposed to be. He’s supposed to have a successful school career, then a successful actual career, and then he’s supposed to get married and raise children, probably two, a boy and a girl.

That has to happen because that’s how he’s planned out his life. Be successful, fall in love, get married, have children, die happy at around five hundred years old, possibly on a spaceship. Besides, the romance movies make all of that business sound _amazing_ , and also when he sees people who are in love, couples who are happy together, it makes him want to cry, it’s so beautiful. He wants that so much. But if just _liking_ a girl romantically makes his heart expand and totally falling in love is likely dangerous to his health, he doesn’t want to know what would happen if his heart broke.

Because _if_ falling in love could make him explode, having his heart broken _would_ literally just ruin him, make him disappear or maybe turn him into foam on the ocean like the little mermaid, floating alone forever as the water ebbs and flows, the land always just out of his line of sight.

That’s why Chris has to be careful when it comes to falling in love.

Even if he’s a robot, even if over his twenty years of life he has realized that his body is a microchip that can be easily destroyed, he doesn’t have a machine brain, and he definitely doesn’t have machine feelings. He has a brightness in him that could light every big city on the planet and make him into a cold constellation in the process, and that means the person who is going to kill him has to be perfect.

**Not a Bad News Kinda Guy**

Chris has trouble disappointing people, has trouble saying or doing things that might be true or even necessary but could make them angry or sad.

(Case in point: his mother, asking him if he’s really as happy about her remarrying as he says he is.

“No,” he says because he thinks his mother wants him to tell the truth, so he swallows the automatic affirmative and _does_. Then he sees her face fall and he’s seen her cry enough times to know that she’s going to start very soon, and immediately says, “I mean yes! He’s nice, I like him. He’s good for you and it’s good that you’ve fallen in love after dad left and everything.”

Chris is a terrible liar, and usually his mother can see right through him, but not this time. This time she smiles and hugs him tightly and says, “Thank you, Chris.”

Then she cries anyway, and Chris feels a little cheated.

Gavin Morris is going to be his stepfather, and he’s great, he really is, everyone’s great, but Gavin doesn’t talk to Chris very much, he just smiles at him and nods when Chris talks to him and pats Chris on the shoulder and says, “Mhm, okay, hon,” and doesn’t spend very much time with Chris at all. He’s just friendly, like an acquaintance Chris talks to in the supermarket line.

Chris wants his dad, who is in Sweden but sends him letters telling him all sorts of things, letters than end with “Love, daddy”, and postcards that Chris carefully pins up on the corkboard next to his bed and looks at when he’s sad.

He still doesn’t know why his dad isn’t here anymore, he just knows that he was twelve years old and dad came into his room and dad’s golden blond hair caught the moonlight and shone so that he looked like a friendly ghost, and his eyes were glossy with tears when he said, “I love you so much, Chris. I really do. I’ll still be in your life, I promise, but I just can’t be in one place anymore, and your mom and I aren’t meant for each other. I’m sorry.”

Chris hadn’t understood, he’d just stared and reached out to touch his dad’s hair like he could catch the moonlight there. “Dad?”

“I’m leaving, okay? I’m gonna travel the world, it’s what I’ve always wanted to do, you know that. You’ll be with me, okay? In spirit.”

“I don’t want you to go,” Chris had said, still confused. “Why are you leaving?”

“Didn’t you notice mommy and I aren’t sleeping in the same room? That we don’t talk anymore? That when we talk we fight? That it’s been going on for months?”

“Yeah. But I thought you’d get over it because you love each other.”

Dad had smiled a little, but it hadn’t looked right, it was just a baring of teeth on his sad face. “We didn’t. Sometimes people don’t, and sometimes people really aren’t meant to be together. You know that once I climbed Mount Everest?”

Chris grins. “Yeah. There are pictures. There are pictures of you in _everywhere_.”

“Not everywhere. I’d like to go everywhere.”

“But why do you have to leave me behind?”

His dad had sighed. “You’re a kid, Chris. You’re _my_ kid. And I love you so much.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

But dad had just kissed his forehead and whispered, “I’ll write you.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“I love you, Chris.”

“…I love you too.”

The next day, Chris’s mother had laughed and cried for hours while Chris tried to make things better through his own tears.

“It’s incredible he even stuck around for fourteen years,” his mother had eventually said. “Incredible.”

“What?” Chris asks.

“Haven’t you noticed? Your dad travels. He doesn’t stick around, not for anyone.”

“He stuck around for me.”

“Well, not long enough.”

Chris had gone to his room, slammed the door, and sobbed.

And then his mom fell in love again and got married again, and Chris can’t stop missing his dad.)

Chris tries to fix things for people, because if he can’t they like him less. If he can’t help the students that he tutors in math get the grades they want, they’re disappointed and sad, and it’s really terrible. If he doesn’t get amazing grades, that disappoints his parents and teachers, and that’s terrible too. If Chris isn’t making people feel better, he’s not living life right. He’s not doing what he’s supposed to.

That’s why he goes into accounting, because he can help people and he’s always been a numbers guy. It’s so incredibly easy to just do things in his head and to play with numbers and spend time doing math problems, which are so much simpler than everything else in the world, and just so _fun_ and _interesting._ Chris can talk about numbers for hours, even though by the time he’s twenty and out of high school he’s learned to shut up sometimes and let other people talk.

His stepbrother Warren Morris will listen to him talk, though, about the things he loves, numbers and vitamins and exercise, the body and the universe in general. Warren says it’s interesting and that he likes how enthusiastic Chris is about everything.

They play catch. It’s nice, and it makes Chris feel better about Gavin Morris being his stepfather, because Chris and Warren are friends who actually spend time together just one on one, and Warren gets along with Chris’s mother, which makes Chris happy because Warren deserves that, since Warren’s mom died when he was just a baby.

Warren likes old movies, and Chris watches with him and listens to him talk about that and theater. Warren’s a make-up artist and an actor, and he’s very good. Chris isn’t any good at acting because it’s mostly like lying and he doesn’t understand how you could be someone _other_ than yourself for so long. It seems very complicated, he tells Warren after he comes back from rehearsal for _Othello_ , where he’s playing the title role, which is absolutely _thrilling_ to Chris.

“Well,” Warren says, perfect teeth shining bright white in contrast with his dark skin, “math seems really complicated to me.”

Chris laughs. “That’s true! Well, no one can be perfect at everything.”

“True,” Warren says. “True.”

Warren goes to Europe for college, to a special cosmetology school, and Chris thinks he does very well. They write each other all the time, and they call each other on the telephone when they can even though it’s long distance and they talk for hours.

Chris doesn’t go to Europe for college.

He does leave Wisconsin, though, because he feels trapped there, and there is nothing he hates more than being trapped. Chris does admittedly like doing the same thing over and over again, but Wisconsin is full of memories and he’d like to make memories in a new place, maybe. Chris would like to make a lot of memories in a lot of settings.

Wisconsin is the best place in the world, but Chris gets an offer from a scout to go to the University of Indiana on a full track scholarship, and he agrees immediately because he doesn’t know how he’d say no to that. If they’re scouting people out it means the team needs a track star like him, and Indiana’s the most phenomenal place in the world, so it’s a great idea.

His mother is thrilled. Gavin Morris smiles at him and says, “Good job, kid,” and that feels wonderful too.

Chris is ready for an adventure, and considering the fact that going to the supermarket is an adventure, going to college will be an even _bigger_ adventure, especially if it’s in another state.

It’s a lot.

It’s a lot, but Chris makes loads of friends even though he misses spending time with Warren, and having roommates is hard because a lot of them are messy and unpredictable, so Chris gets a work study job and a job at a grocery store and quickly moves out of the dorms and into a very small and somewhat unclean apartment, though he manages to clean it, he cleans whenever he sees or senses dirt. He does his best to make it as appealing as possible, to make the space his own, buys all sorts of books about feng shui (and gets, according to Warren, “a little obsessed”), and overall it ends up pretty nice. He lives there for a long time, even after he has enough money to get a much better place (objectively, at least), right up until he becomes a government auditor for the state and buys a condo in Indianapolis.

Chris decides to study accounting not just because it's helpful but because he loves numbers and he’d be good at being an accountant. He _is_ good at it, all the theoretical parts. He’s good at helping people figure out how to deal with their money, and he’s just good at dealing with money in general.

He graduates summa cum laude from the University of Indiana, aces the examination to become a Certified Public Accountant, and makes a life for himself working at a temp agency and then bouncing from accounting firm to accounting firm. Finally he ends up comfortably finding the perfect job where he fits in and is able to make friends that he goes to bars with sometimes as an accountant at a dot-com (and doesn’t that make him feel like he’s really helping the future flourish) in 1993 and he works there until 1996.

Which is when he’s laid off.

“I’m really sorry, Chris,” his boss tells him as he stares at the man in absolute horror. “We just can’t afford to keep you on.”

“But I _like_ this job,” Chris says. “It’s _my_ job. I’ve had it for three years and I’ve done very well.”

“I know, ” his boss says, looking sympathetic, and _this_ is a man who is good at giving bad news. “But we’ve got a surplus of accountants, honestly, especially for how well we’re doing, and we honestly thought that it would be best to let you go because you’re a good worker and you’d be able to find a better job anywhere.”

“That’s not how firing works,” Chris tries to explain. “You’re supposed to fire the people who don’t do well.”

“I’m sorry, Chris. We’re a tight knit company and I know it, but we can’t keep you on. You’re a fantastic guy and a fantastic accountant, a joy to work with, but we don’t need you.”

Chris stares for a while, rocking back and forth anxiously. _We don’t need you._

It’s a blow that Chris doesn’t think he’ll ever get over, because being needed is so important. He has to be needed. He cannot be expendable. This is a failure, he’s a failure, and he eventually nods and smiles and says, “Well, it was a pleasure working with you,” and gathers up his things, leaves them in his car, and runs home.

Actually, he runs _past_ home, until night time, when he stops in the middle of a place he doesn’t recognize and realizes his body did that thing where it moved without him knowing, tried to run and hide at the same time, hide from all the terrible thoughts that are spinning around his head, making it ache.

Chris ducks into an alleyway and covers his mouth to keep himself from screaming and tries his best to breathe as he sits on the (dirty, very dirty) ground and gasps and hums and cries and rocks back and forth, unable to control himself, unable to deal with the fact that he is nothing, he’s less than the dirt that’s seeping into his skin, even if he is the first person to live to 150 it won’t matter because he won’t have meant anything, he is not needed, he was not needed. They were able to let him go just like that.

He was not necessary. It is not necessary for him to be on this earth so he doesn’t know what he’s doing here at all, he doesn’t know why he exists if he’s got nowhere to be, nowhere to work, nobody to be around because the friends he makes at work don’t usually stick around once he’s not immediately available.

Chris is going to work himself up into an aneurysm, and that just makes it harder to breathe and he can’t stop crying.

He doesn’t know when he passes out, he just knows that he wakes up in a dirty alleyway, confused and terrified, and runs around the city until he finally finds his apartment again.

He drinks three glasses of water, curls up in bed with his dirty clothes still on, even his shoes, and sleeps for two days.

Then he spends about a month locked in his apartment doing push ups and sit ups and running on his treadmill and eating and drinking enough to not die.

Later on, he doesn’t remember very much of that month at all.

He just remembers that he comes out on the other side with his head throbbing constantly and bruises covering his entire body and his muscles aching and his stomach burning, knowing that if he’s going to be needed he has to get a job that really does make him necessary, that involves _honestly interacting_ with people.

And Chris blurs away into somebody who is maybe half of himself.

Chris becomes a government auditor for the state in a whirlwind of interviews and laughter and impressive displays of confidence and competence, with what really cinches his getting the job being the fact that he’s able to pump people up or put them at ease or do both at the same time, that people like him and he is a friendly face even though government auditors aren’t exactly good news people and have to make hard decisions.

Chris doesn’t think about that.

Chris doesn’t think about anything but being liked and necessary and good at math and good at _people_ when they’re in groups and when he’s working with them and, and, and...  


Chris does not think about that fact that he’s not a bad news kind of guy. He’s just a numbers guy and a people person, and a week into his job (when he isn’t so high on vitamins and happiness) he realizes that he isn’t cut out for it, that he barely remembers how to do any of this anyway, he barely remembers his training, though he must have been trained.

Chris doesn’t remember anything but giddy happiness and being so far on top of the world that he was practically on a higher plane, and now that he is no longer there, now that he is just actually existing as he normally does in the beautiful, wonderful world with beautiful, wonderful people, he flounders.

Because he has to break people’s hearts.

He has to suggest that people be fired even when they’re not doing anything wrong at all, when they were just caught in the crossfire.

He has to cut budgets for important things that just aren’t important _enough_ or that simply aren’t financially feasible.

He has to get yelled at constantly, and told that he gives people the wrong idea because he seems so cheerful and positive all the time even though it’s not like he can look solemn constantly, that’s just not how his face works.

It takes a few towns where he cuts budgets and fires people and cries until he gets sick and runs and exercises until he can sleep his normal five hours and takes so many vitamins that he’s barely coherent for him to realize he’s going to get fired soon.

He really is a failure.

Chris smiles and smiles and smiles and learns every single name that he is told and tries his best to honestly help people out, and when he does—when he saves a program or saves a town from bankruptcy or saves someone’s job—he feels amazing, like a superhero.

But helping people out also involves hurting people, disappointing them, and Chris doesn’t know how to deal with that without falling to pieces.

He is horrified that he’s so weak, but his stomach always hurts and he’s always afraid that he’s sick with something, he spends hours in front of the mirror trying to make sure that he’s not horribly ill, spends hours rearranging his furniture and retying his tie to make it perfect, to make the world balanced and correct again.

Chris almost wants to get fired at this point, even though technically if he didn’t have to deal with everything on his own and hurt people all the time so that he can help their town (and he is one hundred percent aware of how fucked up that sounds) he would love his job.

Chris doesn’t know what he’ll do when he gets fired, though. He guesses he’ll find a job as an accountant and go back to just running marathons for charity as opposed to trying to interact with the people he’s helping _and_ running marathons for charity. Chris hates being alone, and he’s started getting anxious staying in the same place and he spends hours rearranging things to make them correct and checking his temperature and washing his hands and he keeps running to places he doesn’t really know without being totally aware of it and his diet has become a mix of salad and supplements and his doctor is starting to wonder if there’s something going on _emotionally_.

There isn’t anything going on emotionally. Chris is fine. Chris is fine, except he feels like his body’s falling apart when he’s not moving, and he keeps sleeping on benches that are on the other side of the city from his condo.

Chris smiles through it all, he is happy through it all, because it’s how his face works and because he can’t _not_ be happy. He doesn’t know how to do that. He doesn’t know how to keep himself from collapsing under the weight of sadness and anxiety, which is unfortunate because that means that his legs give out a lot and thus Chris spends a great deal of time lying on the ground and desperately trying to breathe through the straw that his airway becomes, sure that this is it, his body’s finally been destroyed.

Chris’s head hurts all the time, but that’s probably his fault because he keeps banging it against things or slamming his hands against his forehead.

But Chris is happy. He is always happy. There is no reason not to be happy, because every day is a gift, and life is a miracle and he knows it, he does. He enjoys every day, every single one, even when he doesn’t.

It’s just that it’s scary when the world collapses.

But one day something absolutely incredible happens, something Chris didn’t expect, which is strange because he usually can expect most situations.

He’s been wishing he could have a partner in auditing for months now, but he’s always been told that nobody else is looking for a partner and it’s not exactly common among the people he works with to even have or want a partner they work with quite so closely.

And then someone knocks on his door when Chris is moving his couch for the sixteenth time that day, trying to put it in exactly the right place for the room to be balanced. He manages it just when the person starts knocking again, more insistently.

“Chris Traeger?” someone calls through the door.

Chris immediately grins, because this means he has a visitor, which is wonderful because he hasn’t had any visitors to his condo at all this year. He doesn’t register the fact that he doesn’t recognize this voice, that he doesn’t know who this person is.

He goes over to the door and opens it and is faced with a thin, badly dressed man who must be a few years younger than Chris, who has bags under his eyes that are so pronounced that at first look Chris thinks they’re bruises (actually, one of them _is_ a bruise, for some reason this guy has a black eye) and thick brown hair that he has clearly tried and failed to tame.

“Chris Traeger,” the young man says. “Uh. Hi. My name is Ben Wyatt, I’m a government auditor for the state, I mean, I work where you do, and I’ve heard you were looking for a partner.”

Chris’s smile widens, excitement starting to make fireworks in his chest. He’s heard of Ben Wyatt. Not necessarily good things, but Chris doesn’t mind, he knows how untrue rumors can be, and even among the negativity there is one thing that is always there: _he really is a good accountant_. “That’s very true, Ben Wyatt,” he says.

“I’m, uh, also looking for a partner. I’m a numbers guy, but I’m also a bad news guy. I heard you’re a numbers guy and a good news guy. I think it would be practical to work together.”

Ben Wyatt continues to stand in the doorway after saying that, looking awkward and out of place. “So, yeah,” he finally says, looking uncomfortable under Chris’s smile. “What do you think?”

Chris bounces, excited, points at Ben, and says, “Ben…Wyatt.”

“Uh,” Ben says.

“Come on in! We’ve got to talk about how we’re going to do this.”

Ben Wyatt’s relieved smile is one of the most beautiful things Chris has ever seen.

**Numbers Guys**

Ben Wyatt is all business. Even the very first time he and Chris met, by the time he sat down on Chris’s couch he was already talking shop. He really only talks about work, and seems bemused when Chris attempts to befriend him by offering him food (Ben doesn’t even _know_ what portobello mushrooms are, apparently) or trading exercise tips (Ben does not have any exercise tips to trade, as it turns out, because he doesn’t even _have_ a set exercise routine and his only reaction when Chris tells him about his own is “good Lord”).

Chris isn’t entirely sure what to do with Ben, honestly, so he’s mostly just as enthusiastically friendly as he can be, talking brightly and making eye contact (which is key to creating connections and seeming confident and together, so Chris always makes the most intense eye contact possible because as far as he can tell from his research, constant eye contact both commands respect and puts people at ease) and asking questions and inviting Ben for runs or to stay for dinner once they’re done with work.

Ben never accepts any invitations, just mumbles an excuse to leave, packs up his briefcase, and goes, waving awkwardly.

Chris is confused.

(“You don’t have to make a connection so fast, Chris,” Warren says when Chris explains the situation over the phone. “You haven’t even known him that long. Give him time to warm up to you.”

“People usually warm up to me much more quickly than this.”

“Well, everyone’s different, right?”

“Of course! Different and amazing the way they are!”

Warren laughs. “That’s right.”)

They’ve been working together for two weeks and soon they’ll be heading out to Nice, Indiana, which Chris is thrilled about. He thinks that going to a place called “Nice” for their first job together is a good omen, not to mention the fact it sounds amazing, an idyllic small town with a notable amount of cows. There are lots of cows in Indiana. Chris really enjoys that.

Of course, Nice is _literally_ bankrupt. They haven’t been doing a very good job of handling their money responsibly. Sometimes Chris doesn’t even know how towns can mismanage their money so completely, considering that he’s fairly sure they should have people managing their finances before auditors have to pop in.

“Corruption and incompetence,” Ben says decisively the day before they’re going to head out to Nice when Chris marvels about the incredible amount of ways administrators can find to irresponsibly spend their town’s money, just another example of the incredible depth and breadth of human creativity. “Every town is full of it. It’s always the same. People either do something stupid and irresponsible, thinking that it’s a good idea, or they’re funneling money towards things they _know_ aren’t in the government’s best interest, it’s just that it’s in _their_ best interest, so they don’t care how many people they screw over.”

Chris looks at Ben, horrorstruck, because objectively Ben might be correct, but he’s looking at it in the most pessimistic way possible, ignoring the fact that humans make mistakes but are incredible no matter what, even if their particular amazingness comes from deep, deep, _deep_ down inside. “Ben…Wyatt…” he says, “you are a Negative Nancy!”

Ben Wyatt looks at him, wrinkling his nose. “What?”

Chris sighs and shakes his head. “Come on, people can’t be all that terrible.”

“They ruin their towns and then we have to come in and fix them up and they still hate us,” Ben says.

“Well, see, all of that makes it sound very bad.”

“That’s because it _is_ very bad.”

“Things can be so much better than you think if you not only do everything _you_ can to improve the town without hurting too many people, but _also_ give the townspeople some hope and make them feel so good that they do the absolute best _they_ can to improve their town!”

Ben looks at Chris with raised eyebrows. “O…kay. Uh, see? That’s why we're working together. Because I don’t do that.”

“You _could_ ,” Chris says.

“I really couldn’t,” Ben says, and he sounds very tired, so Chris just smiles at him.

“Okay! Well, it’s better that way, actually, because if you could, you’re right, you wouldn’t need me. And then we wouldn’t be able to work together, and that would be a bummer!”

Ben looks at Chris and actually smiles.

The next day, Chris swings by Ben’s apartment building to pick him up. It’s not what could be called a “well-kept” building, but it certainly has its charm. Ben’s already there waiting outside, and he rushes forward with two carry-ons, stumbling slightly.

“Hello, Ben Wyatt!” Chris says, bounding out of the car to help Ben with his somewhat unreasonably small suitcases for a month-long trip. It’s early in the morning and Ben nods stiffly at Chris as he tries to load a carry-on into the back of Chris’s car and ends up dropping it on his foot.

“Shit!” Ben yelps as Chris runs over and loads the carry-ons into the trunk, on top of Chris’s more numerous luggage.

“Are you okay?” Chris asks. “You _literally_ smashed your foot with that small suitcase.”

“Yes,” Ben says through gritted teeth, which makes Chris think his foot probably hurts more than he’s letting on. “Just fine.”

“Well, alright,” Chris says, trying to figure out something to say before they head off on a six hour trip together. He can’t, which is alarming, so he just smiles and tries not to feel anxious because it’s ridiculous to feel anxious with someone he knows so well, except he actually _doesn’t_ know Ben well, which is becoming more and more evident to him now that Ben’s riding shotgun and staring out the window, dark sunglasses on.

It’s practical—Chris is also wearing dark sunglasses due to the simple fact that the sun is shining directly in his face and he needs to be able to see—but it feels like one more barrier between him and Ben, one more way to not make eye contact, which is silly because they wouldn’t be able to make significant eye contact in this situation anyway. Chris is driving, he likes driving. He’s always fond of constant movement, no matter what kind of package it comes in, even though it’s not even close to being as good as running.

“Well,” Chris says cheerily, “a road trip, this is nice.”

“Hm,” Ben says.

Chris goes quiet, humming under his breath. He hasn’t turned on the radio because he forgot to at first and he can’t take a hand off of the steering wheel for long enough to turn it on and he can’t think of anything to say because he’s busy.  


Sometimes he forgets the fact that he gets a little frazzled when he drives sometimes. The problem is that even though it’s nice constant movement, it’s also nice constant movement in a metal death trap.

“Over 30,000 people die in automobile crashes every year,” Chris says casually and without thinking about how that might sound to his passenger.

Ben’s head whips towards Chris. “Good Lord. Where’d that come from?”

“It’s a fact,” Chris says, trying not to sound anxious. He doesn’t. Mostly he sounds like he feels very cheerful about fatal vehicular accidents for reasons defying explanation.

“Uh,” Ben says, “okay?”

Chris goes quiet again, his—attempt at starting a conversation? falling flat.

Then Ben says, “Um, that costs something like 41 billion bucks in work loss in the United States. And, um, medical costs. Fatal car crashes, I mean.”

Chris grins, excited, because not only does Ben know these facts, but he’s willing to talk about them, and that’s _amazing_. “In Indiana, the state-based costs of fatal crashes are about 883 million. Every year!”

“The state really needs to work on that,” Ben mutters. “It’s costing way too much. I mean, it’s not as bad as Florida, but still.”

“4 billion, right?”

“Florida? 4.16 billion.”

Chris shakes his head. “That’s far too many deaths. It’s really a bummer.”

Ben chuckles. “That’s one word for it. Money would be easier to handle if things were safer.”

“And less people would get hurt, which would be great!”

“That too.”

The drive is smoother after that as Chris talks money with Ben, who is honestly the best accountant he’s ever met. He has an incredible grasp of numbers, and Chris has literally never been more impressed with an accountant in his life. The knowledge of facts about car crashes aren’t a fluke either, Ben knows an encyclopedic amount about state costs and how to run a small government. So does Chris, but Ben really has a knack for it that even Chris, who’s always loved numbers but has also always been heavily involved in other interests (namely everything nutrition and exercise), doesn’t have.

Over the course of their time in Nice and, of course, the next several years they spend together, Chris learns about Ben’s other interests. Sports and pop culture are some of Ben’s favorite things other than accounting and government, especially the kind of fantasy and science-fiction things that Chris has never understood. He remembers being in grade school and being unable to get through the first _Star Wars_ movie, covering his ears in the cinema and finally running out of there and flapping his hands until he felt less overwhelmed by all the people and all the confusion on the screen.

It was loud and he didn’t understand anything that was happening—there were lots of spaceships and shooting and everyone was dressed badly and there was a large fluffy malformed werewolf and it was _loud_ , which was honestly frustrating because that’s not how space works. Chris was ten years old and in love with space, and he indignantly repeated to his dad that “there shouldn’t be noise!” until his dad told him to hush and Chris remembered they were in a cinema.

Ben loves _Star Wars_ , though. He’s seen all of the movies and he has all sorts of opinions on them, and occasionally he reads tie-in novels and criticizes them.

(“There’s so much fanfiction that’s better than this garbage,” Ben sighs as he continues reading. Chris has no idea why he reads the books if he hates them so much. When Chris asks Ben says, “There are a lot of _Star Trek_ tie-ins that are way better,” which doesn’t at all answer the question.)

Ben also likes message boards where he can talk to people—or rather, argue with them, it seems like Ben does a lot of arguing on the net, which Chris still barely knows how to use, so he’s impressed—about his ‘fandoms’ (apparently that’s what it’s called when many people like the same thing and enjoy talking about it with each other, which sounds like a wonderful community that’s really making the best of their interests).

Ben spends a fair amount of downtime reading and writing ‘fanfiction’, which Chris enthusiastically reads even though he genuinely has no idea what’s going on because ‘fanfiction’ is when people write stories about stories that already exist, which seems very complicated but also very creative, and Chris is, again, thrilled at the creativity of other human beings, though he is still a bit befuddled at how they can be so involved in something fictional. Chris doesn’t really watch movies or TV, and the books he reads are either classics (because he’s supposed to read those, they’re important) or nonfiction.

Still, Ben’s actually a good writer. Chris, whose efforts to write fiction have always ended in disaster, is impressed. Ben has a lot of talents.

Unfortunately, it is very true that Ben really has _no_ talent _at all_ when it comes to making people like him, or even just making people not hate him. Chris thought that Ben might have been exaggerating just a little even after he’d insisted on that, but he wasn’t.

Chris can tell why Ben was so desperate to find a partner the first time he sees Ben talk to government officials in Nice: Ben cares about the numbers and about doing his job as quickly and practically as possible, and he is not a people person. He’s not even close to being a people person. Not only that, but he really is the only person Chris has ever met who is actually, literally bad at giving good news, which obviously means he _definitely_ can’t spin medium or not-amazing news to look better than it might actually be, and he’s not even slightly able to keep everyone’s hopes up. _Everything_ Ben says when he’s working is, quite honestly, uninspiring.

Chris thinks everyone’s a winner and can do things well. Ben’s just not very good at doing the people part of his job well. He cuts budgets with no apparent feeling. He fires people and doesn’t seem to care at all. He does nothing to make people feel like they can actually take on the issues facing their town.

In short, Ben really does need Chris, and Chris is officially no longer worried that Ben actually won’t need his help and has it in him to do the part of the job that Chris does best really well and will learn how and then no longer need Chris.

Ben does _not_ have it in him, and so Chris is able to easily step in with not even a shred of guilt when Ben is talking about approximately _how_ bankrupt Nice is and going through numbers and mentioning that people are definitely going to get fired and, oh, they might have to eliminate the Parks department, since that’s not a particularly important one.

And Chris fixes things and makes everyone feel happier, because that’s what he does, that’s what he’s always trying to do. He fixes things and people start smiling at him and looking at Ben less and thinking that maybe it’s not as bad as it seems (it actually _is_ as bad as it seems, Chris cannot stress enough that Nice has _grossly_ mismanaged its money, but the power of positive thinking is not to be sneezed at), and clearly they’re getting pumped up and ready to start fixing up what’s broken.

Chris and Ben go through everything together, with Ben doing most of the numbers talk and Chris piping up occasionally and smiling at people and brightly telling them that it’s all going to be a-ok.

“There are always low points,” Chris says as the administrators file out of the room, “but there’s nowhere to go but up!”

Everyone smiles at him and he smiles back, and everyone seems to feel okay as they leave _and_ Ben has made sure that the cold hard facts haven’t been (completely) sugarcoated.

Chris looks over at Ben and beams. Ben looks back at him with wide eyes.

“You are…really good at that,” Ben says.

Chris just laughs. “Do you want dinner? I want dinner.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever. Chris, _no one yelled at me_ ,” Ben says, apparently unable to get off of the topic.

“Well, they yelled a little.”

“Oh, trust me, considering what’s happened before, that really didn’t count.”

Chris assumes that that means today was a success, the first in what he’s certain will be a long list of them.

(Of course, there are issues. Chris does have the tendency to completely abandon Ben when really bad news is going to be given, such as when Ben’s talking budget cuts with the smaller departments, and he wishes he didn’t but he gets nervous around yelling and crying and general bad moods. He always wants to make everything better, and he can’t. Ben can deal with it, so after a while Chris starts pretending it’s Ben who is to blame for the bad news that follows them like a shadow, or a zombie. A shadow zombie. Ben is especially irked when Chris asks him “is there _anything_ we can do, Ben?” about something somebody’s complaining about, because the answer is almost always “no”.

Chris knows he’s kind of being a jerk, but he doesn’t mention it and neither does Ben.

One day when they’re eating dinner after an especially rough day Ben grumbles, “You’re such a flake,” like he usually does when he brings Chris’s bad work habits up, and then he sighs and says, “at least I don’t get death threats anymore.”

“That’s something!” Chris says, feeling guilty, and Ben shrugs. “At least we’re friends?” Chris tries. “It’s better to have more than one person. One person is lonely and stressful, two people are a team.”

“Well,” Ben says, smiling, “we are definitely a team.”

It’s been a year and a half and Ben and Chris have been on four jobs together and that’s the first time Ben has ever said that, so Chris rocks back and forth joyfully in his chair, once, twice, and claps his hands for a moment, laughing.

Ben looks surprised and glances around anxiously—sure enough, there are people staring—but in the end, he smiles.)

It takes four years of partnership for Ben to actually tell Chris about Ice Town.

Of course Chris _knows_ about it, there’s no way he couldn’t. He might not be as good at using the net as Ben, but he can certainly look someone up, and it’s not like Chris hasn’t heard all sorts of things from the other people he and Ben work with.

Chris isn’t a fan of mean gossip (though he does admittedly enjoy non mean gossip—he likes learning about other people, after all), and he often finds the opinions of his coworkers unfair when it comes to Ben, because just because they join Ben or Chris or both for lunch every once in a while to talk shop and whatever else they want to talk about doesn’t really mean that they _actually know_ Ben and how responsible and smart and _competent_ he is.

Chris is deeply disappointed and vaguely…irked when his coworker Betty Grey says, “It’s incredible that Wyatt even got a job after that fiasco.”

“Seriously,” Neil Jakes responds. “Governmental incompetence at its finest, and now he’s playing at fixing governments.”

“I work closely with him,” Chris reminds them, “and I can tell you that he’s not _playing_ at anything. He’s a fantastic auditor, everyone agrees on that! Ben Wyatt was _eighteen_ when that happened. If anyone was at fault, it was Partridge for electing an eighteen year old as mayor.”

“Well,” Neil Jakes mumbles, “I guess.”

Chris doesn’t really spend much time with those two after that.

But still, Ben doesn’t really talk about what happened in Partridge. He mentions it, sure, and his work is clearly informed by it (which does, granted, denote a worrying amount of self-hatred, considering how he works), but he doesn’t tell the story. Chris doesn’t mind, because he knows it, and there are lots of things he doesn’t particularly want to tell anyone about his own youth.

One day, though, when Ben’s exhausted and sad, too tired to continue working on the town they’re heading to in five days and sprawled on Chris’s couch with his hair in disarray, he says, “People are fucking idiots.”

“Ben Wyatt!” Chris says, shocked even though he honestly shouldn’t be so shocked by Ben saying things like this anymore because he says them all the time. “You are _such_ a pessimist! People are wonderful and intelligent in many different ways. There’s no such thing as an idiot!”

Ben snorts, tugging at the collar of his faded band t-shirt. “I’m an idiot.”

Chris shakes his head. “You are the smartest person I know.”

“I bankrupted an entire town when I was eighteen. I mean, you must know about it. Partridge fucking Minnesota. I got elected at eighteen fucking years old and then I managed to totally destroy everything building a winter sports complex called Ice Town. I wasn’t even nineteen when I got impeached.”

“Exactly, Ben. You were eighteen. I was a junior in high school when I was eighteen, chasing girls and worrying about schoolwork and track.”

Ben looks over at Chris, eyebrows furrowed in an expression Chris can’t read. “Really?”

“Why would I lie?” Chris asks, genuinely confused.

“…Fair enough. Still, though. Who bankrupts a town?”

“Lots of people, you know that. We’re auditors!”

“Right,” Ben says, letting out a huff of air that Chris likes to think is borne of amusement rather than icky feelings. “You’re so positive, man. I never thought someone could be so positive until I met you.”

“Well, you know I was born—”

“With a rare blood disorder, right. But come on, Chris. There are a bunch of people who were born with rare blood disorders and didn’t die and whatever, and none of them can possibly be like you. They might be optimistic, but you’re beyond that. You’re _you_.”

“Yes, I am me! That’s very true, Ben Wyatt. I’ve always found that the good in humanity far outweighs the bad. No matter what, I love being alive. Even when I’m not…happy, I know that existence is a gift.”

“Yeah, sure. I guess. It’s just I spend my existence doing all this, the auditing, the accounting, you know, to show that I’m responsible enough to run for office again. Anywhere.”

“Ben, you would be a great mayor or administrator of any kind. You _know_ small government by now. A mistake when you were eighteen doesn’t change that. You’re not eighteen anymore, you’re wiser than you were and you know how to manage money with more finesse than anyone I’ve ever known, including me. Give it time, things fall into place.”

“Oh,” Ben says quietly. “Um. I…guess. It’s just…you know, in Partridge they still call me ‘Ice Clown’. They hate me.”

“Then they’re idiots,” Chris says decisively, and Ben laughs so hard he falls off the couch.

**A Grain of Sand**

Chris really does love the world, but he has to admit—even just to himself—that even now that he’s an adult it can still be confusing and overwhelming, with all the noises and people and feelings, the way things change so often in ways he doesn’t always want them to, the way that that change is so often dizzy and sudden and wrong. The way everything ebbs and flows and shudders and twitches, moving under his body even when he’s still.

That’s one of the reasons (one of the many, many reasons) why he doesn’t like being still. It’s unnatural, like moving through wet cement. He hates the wet cement feeling, hates it even more when it comes around without prompting and his limbs get heavy and it even makes him tired to smile. So he outruns the feelings, just as he has always tried to, and it becomes easier and easier as time goes past and his endurance improves. Chris outruns bad feelings, outruns the pit of despair that spends too much time following him. Sometimes he outruns having any feelings at all.

That’s freedom.

That’s flying.

That’s endorphins going to his brain and making things better. Even when things are good—and they are, so much of the time—exercise makes everything _better_ , movement makes everything better. This is a fact, and it has been a fact since he can remember.

(There are things that don’t change.)

He loves anything that gets his blood flowing and that quiets his mind, and _all_ exercise, all of his exercise routines, they’re about ritual and joy, or trying to find joy when he feels like there is none to be found.

Perpetual motion is his kind of motion.

The rhythm of his feet pounding against the ground when he runs feels like a wake-up call and a lullaby.

The thump of his heart when he exercises, push-ups or sit-ups or any of the million other things he can do, is steady and sure, reminding him that he exists, he’s here and he’s healthy enough that his heart is beating exactly as it should. He’s got a turtle heart rate by now, the doctors say, and he’s proud of that, because he remembers being small, remembers the rabbit-thump of his heart as it worked overtime to deal with his sick blood.

And there are the numbers. He moves in numbers. Five thousand, ten thousand, fifteen thousand. Fifty, one hundred, one hundred fifty, two hundred.

Chris loves rhythms, he loves deep noises, he loves it all. That’s why he’s so fond of whale song and ocean noises and throat singing. All of those drive Ben insane, but Chris hears so much beauty in them.

Chris has fun with his vitamins and supplements too, with the acupuncturists he goes to and the nutritionist and the running coach (he doesn’t really need a running coach, but his running coach is a good person to bounce ideas off of and to talk to when he’s worried). He likes arranging all of his supplements in different ways and counting all of the pills in each bottle and lining them up and memorizing the information on the bottle and all of the other information he has in encyclopedias and books.

The vitamins and supplements and exercise make him so happy in a way he can’t quite describe. He loves learning about them and he can talk about them for hours, can repeat names of supplements under his breath when he’s upset, can count the pills and arrange and rearrange the bottles to make him feel less nervous, more in control.

(It gets stressful when he’s very anxious and instead of wanting to arrange and rearrange and count bottles or pills or anything else, he _has_ to because it’s not right and something terrible will happen if it’s not right, and it’ll be all his fault because he didn’t just take the time to rearrange like he was supposed to, like the discomfort in his fingers and chest told him to.

The worst is when he gets stuck, when he can’t stop making everything right, making everything perfect and beautiful and safe.

He knows, he _knows_ he doesn’t really have to do those things, but his body doesn’t believe his brain, and eventually his brain doesn’t believe his brain either.

Sometimes he gets stuck and can’t stop making everything right, making everything perfect and beautiful and safe. Sometimes he spends hours rearranging and counting and locking and unlocking the door until it’s _really_ locked, until it’s the kind of locked that means he has not invited evil upon his home and his life and the people he loves.

Chris has an amount of power that terrifies him, and it’s his job to keep it under control.

 _With great power comes great responsibility,_ Ben—or rather, Spider-Man through Ben—would say.

See, that’s one reference Chris understands.)

Anatomy factors into his life because Chris wants to know everything about his body, _has_ to know everything about his body to feel safe, and he likes it too, he enjoys looking at anatomy textbooks and seeing what’s inside, he always has, ever since he was in the hospital insisting that the nurses tell him about his muscles and veins and bones and blood.

And Chris knows food. He knows what’s good and what’s bad, knows what he should eat and what he shouldn’t, knows exactly what he has to put in his body and exactly what is poison that must be avoided at all costs. He loves nutrition because so much of it is numbers: calories, percentages, Body Mass Index.

He can wrap himself up in these interests for hours and still be willing to spend more time on them. He loves learning about all sorts of things, but these particular interests have had a special place in his heart for what feels like a million years.

“Do you want to talk about something else, sweetie?” his mom would ask when he was talking about vitamins or a new kind of exercise he’d learned or something else about the body that could help him in his quest to be The Most Healthy.

He always smiled at her and said, “No, it’s okay!”

He hadn’t understood, not then, that she meant that _she_ was the one who wanted to talk about something else until Warren finally explained that particular conversational nuance to him. He still wonders why she never just _said_ that she wanted to talk about something else. He would have changed subjects. He would’ve asked what she wanted.

(These days, Chris usually calls his mother when he’s sad. Her voice is comforting and familiar, and it doesn’t even matter that she can’t really help him.)

People are great, but they continue to be mysterious. Sometimes Chris doesn’t understand them at all even now that he’s well past the age where he’d assumed people would no longer be alien to him, and that’s another reason why he has those things he loves so much. That way he has something to talk about, something that he can use to bond with other people when he can’t only be his outside self anymore. He’s better at talking to people now, though, because what he mostly does is ask them questions. He loves learning all about them, after all, like reading a book.

_Phenomenal._

Chris reads himself too, but he tends to ignore the things inside. He looks at himself in the mirror a lot, checks his body for blemishes—anything, anything that mars his skin—and carefully covers them up with concealer when he finds them. He’s an old hand at that by now.

(Warren taught him how to apply make-up when they were teenagers, and they’d play with the different stage makeups Warren had for hours, trying to look like completely different people.

When Chris had started comparing his body to a microchip, Warren had made him up like a robot as a joke. Chris had enthusiastically agreed because he always liked trying new make-up, but when he’d looked in the mirror it had made him so nervous—the his-face-but-not-his-face feeling that was usually so fun instead seemed like something dangerous, like this was his real face instead of a pretend one, like he would never be able to get it off because instead of caking make-up onto his face, Warren had somehow scraped him raw to show him what was under his skin, machine instead of person—he hadn’t been able to breathe.

Warren had freaked out and begged Chris to calm down and promised they wouldn’t try robot make-up again, it wasn’t that great anyway, and he had new zombie make-up to try out so Chris would get to be dead for a while and that meant he _really_ couldn’t be a robot because robots couldn’t die, could they?

Chris hadn’t been able to argue with that logic, and he’d calmed down a few minutes after that.)

Chris fears blemishes because he fears illness and often illnesses are written on people’s skin.

He has _reasons_ to be afraid. It’s entirely natural and rational, considering that he _does_ get sick, though he’s only actually had to go to the hospital specifically for his blood disorder four times in the last thirty years.

(“Most people with TTP have to do this a lot more,” his hematologist said soothingly last time Chris was in the hospital due to a relapse. “You’re very lucky. There’s a reason you’ve been a case study—how many times now?”

“Seven,” Chris says.

“Nice. Don’t worry about it, Chris. You’re only gonna be here a couple more days, the FFP’s working great. Trust me.”

Chris almost does.)

Despite everything, medical professionals still seem to think Chris worries too much.

The thing is, Chris isn’t the kind of person who has trouble with hospitals or clinics or doctor's offices. He’s still used to hospitalization, and beyond used to medical professionals.

He goes to regular doctor’s appointments because it’s recommended, which means he has to, and he’s gotten used to it, so used to it that it would be upsetting not to go, an unacceptable change in routine. Chris has a doctor in Indianapolis, Dr. Horowitz, who is very trustworthy and who knows what he’s doing. He knows Chris, and he knows blood.

Chris trusts medical professionals. They went to a special school for it, after all, so they have to know what they’re doing (though Chris has met more than one medical professional who was bad at being good at their job) and he admittedly doesn’t trust them enough to not get second opinions, because humans are delightfully unpredictable, and that means they make mistakes.

Every time Chris goes to see Dr. Horowitz (every month on the same day without fail, even though _technically_ Chris is only supposed to go to the doctor for check-ups every six months to manage his condition, a suggested health plan that he finds horribly blasé) he’s greeted with, “So, what should I be worried about this month?”

It’s the same this month, of course, and Chris likes that. The sameness makes him feel better about his mortality, despite the thinly veiled sarcasm.

And Chris takes out his Trapper Keeper and flips to the physical issues that he has noted this month and his concerns about these symptoms and his hypotheses about what they might mean.

Dr. Horowitz is the only doctor he trusts completely and unconditionally—even more than his hematologist—because Dr. Horowitz has always listened to him no matter what, so Chris still brings in the complaints that have already been addressed that month at the clinic, just in case they weren’t given due consideration.

“Yeah,” Dr. Horowitz interrupts the first time Chris mentions the clinic during the appointment, as usual. “How many times have you visited the clinic this month?”

He already knows because he has Chris’s papers, but Chris tells him anyway. The answer is “three”, also as usual, and Dr. Horowitz responds as he generally does, with a “hm.”

“I just want a second opinion to make sure,” Chris says. “They were busy. Though I’m pretty sure they’re correct. They’re lovely people.”

“I know,” Dr. Horowitz says. “You’ve told me, and I’ve heard a thing or two. Got ears everywhere, y’know. You’re the most well-liked neurotic frequent flyer I’ve ever seen.”

Chris knows why. It’s because he gets along well with the nurses and receptionists and is excellent at comforting distressed people in the waiting room and he understands the concept of triage and that usually he is not a top priority, and he’s only occasionally objected to that. He usually doesn't, though, and one of the nurses brings him a paper bag and if he breathes into it for long enough he doesn’t feel so much like he’s dying. Also, they occasionally give him Valium and pamphlets about illnesses he doesn’t have and numbers for crisis counseling, though Chris doesn’t have crises.

(Once, when Chris was coming down from being particularly upset with the help of a Valium and a paper bag, he heard a newer nurse tell Nurse Hattie Baum, “Maybe we should just try to get him on psych hold next time he comes in like that.”

“Absolutely fucking not,” Nurse Hattie Baum, a veteran nurse in her fifties and who has seen Chris many, many times, had said sharply.

“But he’s always here!”

“One, that’s not even close to legally sound since he’s not a threat to anyone. He’s anxious, but he’s a nice kid, and he’s even helpful. And I’m pretty sure he’s actually been sick a few times.”

“He’s always here! It’s a waste of time.”

“Maybe if he was annoying in any way, I’d listen to you. But he’s not. We check his heart, his blood, his lungs, and anything new and exciting he thinks is wrong, and he’s fine.”

“But then he comes _back_.”

“Trust me, it could be worse. There aren’t many hypochondriacs as nice as Chris. He’s harmless, so let it go. Anyway, it'd be damn irresponsible to not check him over. Man doesn't have a spleen."

Chris had only half-heard the conversation at the time, and whenever he thinks about it, he’s still confused.)

Of course, Chris objects to being called “neurotic”, and he says so.

“Sorry, Chris,” Dr. Horowitz says, but Chris suspects that he might just be saying that to appease him. People say things just to appease Chris a lot, though even when Chris is entirely aware of that he usually goes ahead and lets himself be appeased.

“Okay,” Dr. Horowitz says, looking at Chris’s Trapper Keeper, which includes his documents from the clinic. “Hate to break it to you, but the people at the clinic are right about the complaints you came in there for. The fatigue you described is completely natural when you run…15k and then, what, 1k more to get to the clinic? Same goes for the shortness of breath. Chris, you’re the fitness connoisseur, you should know that it’s natural for you get tired and out of breath when you exercise, especially when you’re already anxious.”

Chris frowns. “It was more than usual,” he protests. “And besides, you know I don’t usually feel that way after exercising, that’s more for other people. I was already out of breath when I started running, and I was having chest pain and tightness, and I had a headache. Oh, and my lymph nodes were swollen! Also, I think I might have hyperthyroidism.”

“One, you don’t have hyperthyroidism. You had a blood test at the clinic a week ago, and your thyroid is perfect. I’ll give you some more blood tests if you want to make sure. Two, do not run 16k when you’re having those symptoms. In fact, don’t exercise at all. Three, take something to help with whatever kind of pain you’re feeling, I’m sure that somewhere in your pharmacy there’s a vitamin or something that helps with that. Just remember not to take ibuprofen or anything with quinine, though I’m sure at least that’s something you’ll remember. Also, there’s probably something to make you calmer, isn’t there? Take that too. Meditate. Four, do _not_ start running when you are having those symptoms.”

“You said that. I mean, that was essentially the idea of the first point.”

“It’s pretty important, and you never listen to me about it, so I’m hoping it’ll sink in this time. If you genuinely think you’re sick after doing all of these things, call someone to drive you to the clinic. If you’re really, _really_ sick, and I mean so sick that you are totally going to die and you can’t even get to the clinic or move or run, call 911.”

“I know all of that.”

“And yet…” Dr. Horowitz mutters. Chris politely ignores him. “Okay, we’re going to do our basic average check up now. Have you for some reason had a change of heart about your entire life and started smoking or using illegal narcotics, drinking excessively, or having large amounts of unprotected sex?”

“Of course not!”

“Alrighty, I thought so. Have you been having sex at all?”

“No, I’m going through a dry spell.”

“Ah, yes, a dry spell of a month. Your vaccines are up to date, and your CBC was perfect the last time you went to the clinic, huh?”

“Yes, but that can change very quickly.”

“True.”

They go through the basics of the check-up, with Dr. Horowitz gamely checking out the symptoms that Chris has pointed out that he finds odd or potentially life-threatening, including the new ones that have sprung up since last time he visited the clinic.

There is generally nothing wrong. Chris still feels uneasy, but Dr. Horowitz’s Harvard-accredited reassurances do make him feel better, because he _always_ feels uneasy about his health, no matter how incredibly healthy he fundamentally is.

But his body is a microchip. He has almost no protection from infection and he knows it.

“As far as I can tell, you’re healthy in all the ways you thought you could be unhealthy, and I’m pretty sure the blood tests will corroborate that when you get them,” Dr. Horowitz proclaims after Chris comes back from getting blood drawn.

He usually says something like that.

“Don’t get too excited,” Dr. Horowitz then says, as always (it’s routine, this is all just routine), and Chris only half-listens to the next words because he knows what they’re going to be, or at least the basics. He doesn’t take them seriously, he never has. There’s a block in his head that won’t let him understand, so he doesn’t try.

“You really do need some more fat, because you’re right when you say 2.8 percent body fat compromises your immune system, which is already compromised. You have to exercise less, because your kind of constant exercise isn’t at all healthy. You need to take breaks, and you really don’t eat enough for the exercise you do, and I’m worried about your diet, namely, the fact that you are on that kind of diet at all. I have no idea how you stay standing, you should be starving. That’s not my area, though, but speaking of that and things that aren’t my area, you should _really_ look at those pamphlets about psychiatric issues I’ve given you. I think you might find the ones about anxiety disorders and eating disorders particularly interesting.”

Chris nods as if he’s one hundred percent listening like he usually is when it comes to other people.

He’s memorized those pamphlets already, memorized them and disposed of them. He’s not entirely sure why he’s always being given those pamphlets, because he can’t possibly have any of those issues, at least not badly. Anxiety can’t cause the things he feels in his body. Chris has always been intense and somewhat nervous, but it can’t possibly make him so sick. And eating disorders are simply impossible, eating disorders are not only mentally but _physically_ unhealthy, so he cannot have one.

Besides, Chris literally cannot be a “hypochondriac” because he _does_ have a history of medical issues, and he has gotten seriously ill even as an adult, ill in a way that's made triage nurses take notice.

Because of this and simply because they make the world into a literal minefield, outbreaks of illness are Chris’s arch nemesis. He always makes sure he’s as protected from outbreaks as possible, but somehow he still gets sick, even with vaccinations, and the illness runs him over like a truck full of radioactive sewage. And then the radioactive sewage gets all over him and makes him even _sicker._

“My body is a microchip,” Chris insists. “A grain of sand could destroy it.”

He says this to Ben from the beginning, and Ben, who is usually doing some kind of math, nods and mutters, “Whatever you say.”

Chris talks about his illnesses and his potential illnesses and the things he is sure are symptoms of a future illness often, and Ben usually mostly tunes him out. Chris knows this because Ben at one point says, “Sorry, man, I kind of tune you out when you get stuck on that.”

But Chris doesn’t mind. It’s good to talk to someone about it, someone who isn’t a medical professional but will say “huh” and “okay” and “that’s interesting” and “that makes zero sense, try again” and “you’re the least dying person I’ve ever met” and “yep” at the right moments. Ben listens to Chris more than anyone else, despite the fact that he only half-listens.

It's around the time that Chris starts working with Ben that he starts going to the clinic much less, mostly because he starts actually taking Dr. Horowitz’s advice and admits that his meditation and vitamins are often very helpful at calming his symptoms until he can discuss them with Dr. Horowitz, and he starts calling somebody to take him to the clinic when nothing has worked and he’s dying.

Before, he didn’t really have anyone to call.

And now, he has Ben.

The first time he calls Ben, it’s because he finds a cut on his shinbone, and he doesn’t remember getting it, though he must have while he was shaving in the shower.

That’s not so much the point, though. The point is that it’s bleeding.

Chris hates his blood. He hates seeing his blood when it’s not going into a tube because that means it’s not going anywhere in particular, it’s not helping him at all, especially if it’s healthy blood that’s leaving him, and Chris needs all the healthy blood he can get.

_And if the blood’s not healthy? What if you don’t stop bleeding? What if the cut gets infected?_

(Septicemia.

Noun.

Blood poisoning, esp. that caused by bacteria or their toxins.)

Chris’s mind asks that question and then won’t stop asking it. Maybe he’ll never stop bleeding, maybe he’s not so healthy, he’s not nearly as healthy as he thinks, though he isn’t unhealthy, that’s impossible.

He has 2.8% body fat.

Chris’s blood is dangerous when it’s inside of him, and dangerous outside.

And it’s _a lot_ of blood. More than it should be. Somewhere deep inside, Chris knows that long cuts that are probably from a razor can bleed a lot without being a real wound, and if this happened to somebody else, Chris would tell them to put some antiseptic and a bandage on the cut and reassure them that they’d be fine. He’s pretty sure he has before.

But Chris feels like he’s losing too much blood, like every trickle of it that slips down his skin, rich and shining, is draining him, draining him, draining him.

(Exsanguination.

Noun.

The action of draining a person, animal, or organ of blood.)

He can feel his heart pounding in his head, or all over his body, and his blood rushing to burst out of his veins and well up in every place under and outside his skin that it’s not supposed to be.

So Chris goes into a spiral of symptoms, starts crying and then catapults right into chest pain and chest tightness and trouble breathing and also a headache, like he’s having a heart attack and a stroke and a brain aneurysm at the same time, and he can’t think of what to do. He tries to take supplements that help with pain but the only thing he can really reach is his Glucosamine, though that’s more for joints than anything, and then he goes ahead and takes melatonin because he wants to calm down before going to the clinic, because he should go to the clinic, or maybe call 911, but by the time he’s stopped dying enough to actually go to see medical professionals he’ll be clinic dying, not 911 dying.

Chris closes his eyes, tries to meditate in some desperate way, but he can’t. He’s never been able to fully clear his mind—there’s just too much in there, always rattling around, thoughts and ideas and memories spinning and bouncing and dancing—so of course he can’t now, of course he can’t, though there is something inside of him that has gone blank with fear.

It's not a meditation kind of blank.

Chris calls Ben. He doesn’t remember this, but he must, at some point, recall Dr. Horowitz telling him to call somebody if he has to go to the clinic instead of running, and he can’t run anyway, lately he’s been stressed and this was just the last in a long line of things that have happened today that Chris doesn’t remember but that clearly weren’t phenomenal in any way, shape, or form, which is a disappointment Chris cannot currently dwell on because now his breathing has been replaced by his crying and he’s pacing and wringing his hands and everything’s too much, the entire world has slammed in on him like a book closing. The air on his skin is torture and the only thing he can hear is sirens and barking and cars outside and the door—

The doorbell.

The door opening.

The door slamming shut, making Chris flinch.

“What happened? What’s wrong? Good Lord, sit down!”

Chris follows those instructions because it’s easier than making decisions, so he sits down on his couch, not just frazzled but entirely terrified, on the edge of death but unable to do anything about it, because he gets like this sometimes but tries very hard not to, at least not alone (he doesn’t want to be alone, please, please, please), because he is so horrified by the idea of getting like this that the onset of these symptoms is enough to get him to go to the clinic. This is something he thinks the people at the clinic don't understand. They don't see him at his worst. If he’s ever like this, he has to wait the most serious symptoms out because his fingers won’t let him call 911. They just won’t.

There’s something that tells Chris that anonymous voices on the phone aren’t to be trusted.

Anyway, this is one of those days that Chris has to wait out until he’s able to get to the clinic, still Valium-level upset but able to move and think and feel and do things. It hit too hard. He was already worn down, and then he saw the blood and he became aware.

No, Chris doesn’t know what he has become aware of, there’s just a sharp feeling of _knowing_ slicing through his brain, of being convinced that he is right about something important, something about his body, and his body is his life, and if there’s something wrong, if there’s something wrong, if there’s—

What if there’s something wrong?

Chris thinks he might be hearing his name _(remember that time when you were a kid and you ran and ran until there were people calling your name?)_ but he’s not sure, until: “Chris!”

Now he’s sure. He looks up at Ben, and Ben’s eyes are wide and his hair is in disarray and he’s dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and he looks like he just woke up and it’s cold outside, where’s Ben’s coat?

Where’d it go? He should be wearing a coat, Ben should be wearing a coat, the fact that he isn’t gets stuck in Chris’s brain. Ben should be wearing a coat. It’s cold, it’s snowing, Chris can see the snow melting in Ben’s hair and making his eyelashes wet. It’s cold.

Chris rocks back and forth, breaths shallow and pained, choked, tortured noises that won’t become words escaping his lips.

Ben is here. Chris must have called him. He doesn’t know when he did that, he can’t remember, and he’s still bleeding and it’s still loud inside and outside and Ben is here. His eyes are brown, and so is his hair. He was born in 1974, seven years after Chris. Chris’s eyes have met Ben's and he can’t look away, because there’s something wild in Ben’s eyes, something—oh.

Ben’s scared.

Chris doesn’t want Ben to be afraid, Chris is already afraid enough for both of them, but Chris doesn’t know how to say that, he doesn’t know _how_.

He doesn’t know how to say anything, he can’t breathe and the drumbeat of his heart is hollow and too loud, too fast. 

“Chris,” Ben says. “Breathe, come on. Breathe.”

Chris nods, because that’s what he wants to do, he keeps trying, he’s gasping in breaths like he’s trying not to drown, like his head’s just above water but he keeps sinking down and he has to breathe desperately to get enough air to get to the shore, to get to safety.

Of course, that’s a metaphor. Chris is a very good swimmer, and he doubts he would ever get into that particular kind of situation.

He hasn’t run in a triathlon in a while. There’s a good reason, he reminds himself, it’s winter, that's a thing he reminds himself of somewhere between the pounding in his head and the pumping of his rebellious blood, his blood that’s breaking out of him like his body's a jail, like the red blood cells and white blood cells and platelets feel that they have been wrongfully imprisoned. Chris didn’t know his blood was so unhappy with him, and he supposes that his body is unhappy with him too, and he didn’t know that his body was so unhappy with him either. He feels betrayed, because he’s done everything to keep his body happy with him, every good thing, even the things the doctors say he shouldn’t do.

“Breathe,” Ben says, kneeling in front of the place where Chris is sitting hunched over on the couch, hands on Chris’s shoulders, gripping hard enough that it doesn’t hurt. “Come on, come on, what’s _wrong_?”

And Chris finds some words and they climb their way up their throat and spill out into the open. “Where’s your coat?”

“What?” Ben asks.

“Your coat,” Chris says frantically. “Where’s your coat? You’ll get sick if you go out without a coat, did you go out without a coat? It’s cold.”

“It’s not that cold,” Ben says, trying to reassure, maybe. “It’s not, I mean, I drove here, there wasn’t much, much of, a, a walk. And…uh, I was, uh, I was wearing one, I just…took it off when I…got in?”

Chris knows Ben is lying because his t-shirt is wet and there are beads of cold water on his arms, where the snow melted.

“You’ll get sick,” Chris says. “You’ll get sick, I’m sick, you’ll get _sick_ , Ben, we can’t both get sick, it’ll make it harder to work.”

“Chris, you’re not sick, not like—that. You’re panicking, you’re freaking out, but you’re okay, you’re not going to die or anything, trust me, I know. I know it sucks, but you just have to breathe with me. Please, fuck, fuck, fuck, _please._ ”

Ben sounds more scared than Chris has ever heard him, and his breathing is pressured too and Chris feels bad, he doesn’t want to make Ben sick too, not when he’s already in danger (everyone’s in danger all the time, but Ben’s been in the snow so he’s in even more danger, but flesh and blood bodies, they’re delicate, other people’s bodies take in the snow and it freezes up their veins), and Chris tries to explain, “The blood. I’m bleeding. Exsanguination, Ben Wyatt, it’s a noun. Fourteen letters.”

Ben looks around wildly and his eyes rest on the cut on Chris’s shin and he says, “Chris, that’s all?”

“No,” Chris says. “No, it’s not _all_. My blood is sick, and who knows what could happen, there’s always sepsis, there’s a constant danger of sepsis, you know, with asplenia. If my skin is weak enough to be cut, then the rest of my body is weak too. I’m a microchip, Ben Wyatt. A grain of sand could destroy me.”

“You’re fine, you’re, you’re, you’re…you’re not going to bleed out, buddy. It’s okay. We’ll fix it, we will. We just need some antiseptic and a band-aid. Then we’re done. We’ll fix it, and you’ll see, you’ll be fine, the blood, you’re not gonna bleed out.”

“I’m _sick_ ,” Chris says miserably.

Ben says, “No, you’re not! You can’t be, you’re not! You’re healthy, you’re fine! If you just breathe, if we just clean up the blood! You’re healthy, even healthier than me.”

Chris shudders and his eyes refocus on Ben’s.

Ben has brown eyes.

Ben’s eyes are wet, his face is wet, but it’s not the snow, and Chris sucks in a deep breath and says, “Don’t cry, it’s okay, everything’s good, great, phenomenal.”

Ben laughs, wet and high-pitched, a little hysterical. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say. Basically. Good, great, phenomenal. And I'm not crying.”

Chris’s breathing is shaky and at least Ben’s here, he’s here and alive and alright, Chris can’t see any sickness in his face but sadness and fear.

“What…” Ben starts, and then he pauses, blinking rapidly. “What’s the…the…how many minutes are in eight hours?”

Ben's voice is strained and the question knocks Chris’s brain to the side as he automatically says, “480.”

“Seconds?”

“28,800.”

“Uh, square root of 5.893?”

“2.428.”

“Yeah. Uh, first ten digits of Pi?”

Chris has to pause, there, his brain slowing down just a bit, and his chest has, at some point, started rising and falling more steadily.

“3.141592653.”

Ben smiles, looking relieved. His hair’s still everywhere, and his face is still pale and his eyes are still red, and he’s still here.

Chris is here too.

“It’s alright, Ben,” Chris says. “Phenomenal. Ben Wyatt.”

Ben smiles. “Chris Traeger.”

**Kiss Goodbye**

Usually, when Chris starts up an actual romantic relationship, it feels like a sunrise. Like a new day. Being with a new lover, it’s exhilarating, and it’s an act of moving on and breathing easily. Of cleansing. Because Chris can’t stop his organs from tying into knots over a former girlfriend until he finds a new one, and then he moves on. Chris isn’t good at moving on, except when it comes to girlfriends, because his girlfriends aren’t really friends.

Chris has romantic relationships everywhere he goes that are as they’ve been since he was young—quick, lustful, joyful. They’re whirlwinds. Sometimes they’re not even romantic at all, they’re largely confined to the bedroom, or bedroom-like places. Or places that are not the bedroom, but a vague substitute. In short, they’re about sex. They’re literally just sex.

And then they’re nothing at all. Chris doesn’t mean that after he and they break up, the women become nothing. They don’t, they’re human beings. They just become people that are no longer candidates for true love. Most of them never were. Chris doesn't get nervous about the idea of falling in love anymore, he just doesn't think about it, lets himself be, and with each new relationship he gets into it becomes more obvious that there's no reason to be nervous. He's not in danger.

In the beginning, Ann Perkins is not particularly exceptional.

Chris is attracted to her as he is usually attracted to people, for simple physical reasons and also because she seems nice and interested in him (though very drunk, which is why he gets her into a cab ASAP).

But something turns out different than Chris expected, because Ann is extraordinary.

She’s _interesting._ Chris thinks everyone is fascinating, of course, but Ann is really amazing and new and exciting.

She’s a nurse (Chris has never dated a nurse before), and not particularly into exercise or sports (though she participates in exercise and meditation with Chris, and seems interested in his passions, though she notably does not talk much about herself, no matter how much Chris tries to get out of her), and she’s smart and funny and kind, and she’s just…phenomenal. The relationship feels like a sunrise, but sometimes, somewhere in the back of Chris’s mind, there is something else that he can’t quite recognize, but that still feels lovely and comfortable.

She’s sharp and no nonsense in certain ways. She seems more interested in the parts of Chris that are deeper inside. Her smile has a world behind it, a kind of fondness that isn’t sunny but is warm.

Even so, Chris breaks up with her because it’s easier and because, no matter how badly it hurts (more than usual), it’ll hurt a lot less than if he goes back to Indianapolis and they grow apart.

Chris sidesteps the implications of the fact that he likes Ann enough to feel like she’s a person he wants to be friends with by simply not being with her anymore. Easy, practical.

It throws everything off when Chris and Ben move to Pawnee, because that’s when Chris realizes that his relationship with Ann is not like the one he has with most of his exes, it can’t be. It’s not frozen in amber, pretty to look at but easy to lock away in a box.

Ann is living, breathing, all around him, beautiful and she doesn’t particularly like him—or perhaps it’s more that she’s not particularly comfortable around him because of the ways she’s misinterpreted his affections, which he understands even though he wishes people were better at compartmentalizing—but then she’s his friend, and it’s nice.

It’s just nice.

But there’s something challenging about being with Ann, among the more comfortable feelings, something electric that makes the world unsteady under Chris’s feet in a way that feels more like a thrill than a reason to panic.

Even so, when Chris realizes he has fallen in love with Ann Perkins, he’s completely shocked.

Ann Perkins doesn’t love him back, and that’s not the part that’s shocking—he broke up with her first, he reminds himself, though all that does is make him want to curl up in the middle of traffic and cry—but it is disappointing. It’s disappointing in a way that Chris cannot fully comprehend, and it becomes a sucking black hole in his chest, the knowledge that though Ben has Leslie now, Chris has nobody. Nobody like that, at least.

Chris gets together with Millie Gergich and is happy enough, he’s even willing to try to move in with her and create a life with her, not because he is in love with her but because it’s so, so much easier to not be. Ann will be his friend. Chris is alright with that. He has enough self-control to never let Ann know how he feels.

Chris’s breakup with Millie Gergich is what makes him realize that he’s going to be alone forever, because the only person he has ever fallen in love with isn’t interested and his friends have their own lives, their own people. Chris looks around and he sees the people he loves being in love, and he can find no place for himself.

Chris needs a place. He needs to be needed.

**Discoveries**

Time ticks by. Chris measures it carefully, to the millisecond. He doesn’t have much time left. No matter how many years he actually does indeed have left (decades upon decades upon decades, he’s a medical miracle, a miracle of science, he might as well keep at it) it’ll never be much time.

Every single moment he is still, he is aging. He knows. And he’s trying to outrun it, but it doesn’t work. There are things he can’t outrun, but he doesn’t think about that, instead he just lets himself be and move and live and love, lets himself be part of the world and works on running to the moon.

Chris knows that his life will mean something, most of the time.

There are moments when he can’t, moments when he melts down and doesn’t understand the concept of time or place or who he is, that he realizes that his body is a temple but every temple turns to ruins, so someday it’ll turn to ruins, and he forgets to remember that it shouldn’t mean everything.

Time ticks by.

Sometimes Chris looks in the mirror and through his study of all the ways he could be sick and his silent criticism of all the pieces of himself that are _extra_ and should go away (cut away the fat from the budget, cut away the fat from the body, it’ll make things better, stronger, easier to deal with) and the things he finds that contradict what he’s been told about how _handsome_ he is (circles under his eyes, wind-chapped skin, gray hair, he’s getting old, people get _old_ and he resents that) he wonders exactly how much is under his skin.

Chris feels like there’s so much of him out in the open, exposed, because being himself is a way to connect with people and all he’s ever wanted to do is connect with people, and he says a lot of the things he thinks, and often he feels so much joy (or knows that if things were just a little different in his head he would be feeling so much joy) that he has to share it with the world, has to make other people understand how beautiful everything really is.

But he has secrets, and that’s a secret too. He doesn’t know how much of himself is real, if the bad things he keeps inside of him are his reality and the rest is dizzy dreamy endlessly optimistic fiction. When he thinks about it, there’s so much that he tries to keep inside.

Sometimes he smiles when he’s not happy.

Sometimes he has dreams he can’t remember when he wakes up, but then he can’t go back to sleep.

Sometimes he arranges and rearranges his furniture for hours, trying and trying and failing and failing to get it right.

Sometimes he knows he’s dying but then it turns out he’s not because he wakes up and smiles because he remembers that every day is counting down to the end, so he might as well make these days count.

Sometimes he just doesn’t understand what other people are doing, doesn’t understand if they’re trying to help him or hurt him, if they’re his friends or not, if they love him as much as he loves them (he doesn’t think so, just because there’s so much love in him that it spreads over the entire world like a net and he doesn’t know how love works for other people, if it hurts so exquisitely), what they’re thinking of at all.

There’s something between Chris and the rest of the world, something keeping him from being like them, it’s the reason that people feel the need to apologize for him even when he doesn’t know what went wrong, the reason that Ben has to explain certain rules of socialization so clearly even though Ben’s not the people person in the relationship, it’s the reason that after a while, people seem to know something about him that he doesn’t.

That thing between him and the rest of the world is almost tangible, but he doesn’t touch it, because in the end it’s not that big a deal.

But sometimes he wonders if it’s a bigger deal than he thinks.

He’s intense, he’s special, he’s different, he’s sure something, but he doesn’t know how many of the words and phrases that are so often applied to him are good or bad or what, especially because sometimes he thinks they can be either good or bad (or both?) depending on the situation.

Chris has begun to understand something that he’s never quite been able to grasp but that he's known, maybe, since he learned the off-brand meaning of the word  _special._

He’s one step removed.

A person.

But one step removed.

He’s an oddity, something to be admired and then what?

He doesn’t actually know.

On the surface he’s something shiny and beautiful and exciting and perfect, and then there’s the rest of him, and after a while people learn about the rest of him, and that’s why so few stick around.

He doesn’t understand this until he ends up in Pawnee permanently and finds people other than Ben who stick around, who aren’t fair weather friends, people who are also different, though not in his way. They don’t have to be, they just have to be themselves.

And it’s magical, that these people trust him and accept him and care about him even when he’s not allowed to be on their side (Chris is the boss and it never stops being quietly thrilling, quietly absurd), that they’re his friends in that comfortable, always kind of way that Ben is.

That’s why in Pawnee, Chris starts to realize what he thinks he might have known in some place inside of himself for a a long time, that his place in the world is something that has been weak and easily forgotten, because he has love everything and everyone, and there just aren’t many people who have loved him back. There’s been his mother, his father, Warren. Ben.

(Ann?)

And now there are these friends who stay, who color his life in this place that’s more exciting than anywhere he could ever have imagined, a place that he thinks Leslie might be right about—the best city in the country, possibly the world. A place that’s different, a place where he fits in.

A place where he realizes that he’s never fit in.

Chris looks around and knows that he’s got everything and he’s got nothing, he’s got people who will stick around, but for how long?

Ben falls in love. Chris thinks about it a lot, over and over again, but it’s an interesting fact: Ben falls in love. He gets engaged. Chris is so happy for him, overjoyed, because Leslie is one of the most fantastic women in the world, one of Chris’s best friends (though not like Ben, no one could be like Ben).

But when it hits him that Ben has found something that Chris has been looking for and he just came by it without even trying, there’s this cold realization, one that makes him move until he’s not sure where he is, and it’s this: there aren’t people like Chris.

(He doesn’t know what kind of person he is. Sometimes he’s not sure if he’s a person at all, or ifhe’s been wrong and his machine body wasn’t _only_ his body at all, instead it was everything.)

So Chris has been lucky to find other special people who can be around him, who can love him back, but there’s one thing he’s never going to find.

Chris has been so lucky in his friendships, there’s no space to be lucky in love. He doesn’t mind, or he shouldn’t, but he’s terrified that romance means more to others than it does to him, that romantic love is supposed to be some kind of higher love and so he’s going to get left behind because everyone’s paired off, everyone’s going to find somebody else, and he’ll be alone because there can’t be more than one person for him, he knew it when he was younger and that wasn’t just youthful folly, it was true. It’s statistically improbable to find more than one person who is right for him.

And he already found that one person.

And he blew it.

Chris needs a place.

He has one.

Chris needs to be needed.

But he’s not, and he starts drowning, only just staying above water by moving, moving, moving. He tries to make sure nobody can notice how absolutely, mind-numbingly miserable he is, though, considering how often people inquire after his wellbeing, he might not be doing a good job of it.

Never mind loneliness. Chris doesn’t feel loneliness. He has himself and the whole world around him.

But it turns out that that doesn’t mean much to him when he doesn’t have people to communicate with, to love up close. Just because he actually fundamentally does doesn’t mean it feels that way, doesn’t mean that they really want to spend much time with him. Chris is an afterthought, and it’s nice that he’s ever thought of at all.

Then there’s this sick whirlwind that leads to Chris sitting in the office of Dr. Richard Nygard with nearly three months of dreamlike horror that he is assured is his own life behind him.

He hadn’t realized that he could go so far down the rabbit hole of perceived abandonment and insecurity and loneliness so quickly until it was pointed out that the rabbit holes he’s dug could destroy a forest.

When Tom Haverford says, “Maybe you should see a therapist,” everything clicks.

Chris is no longer implied to be a person who needs a therapist. Now he is a person who people explicitly believe needs a therapist.

Chris has gone to doctors for so long.

If another one could help him, then what’s he been waiting for?

A sign, maybe.

Or perhaps he’d just gotten to the point where he was willing to attempt to make his brain something that he understands. Something less exhausting.

Chris will go to a shrink if it’ll make things less exhausting, if it’ll make things easier, if, if, if.

Chris is ready to say “if”.

Dr. Horowitz gives him Dr. Richard Nygard’s card with a wide smile. “I’m proud of you,” he says.

Chris doesn’t know why he would be, but the idea that he’s made somebody proud makes him happy, and he doesn’t even have to force himself to be.

He just is.

**Epilogue**

Dr. Richard Nygard is amazing, and Chris learns how to slow down just enough to legitimately enjoy things again.

Then there are diagnoses Chris doesn’t entirely know what to do with. A lot of letters. ASD, OCD, GAD.

They don’t mean anything to him until Dr. Richard Nygard explains that it turns out that he’s really not any kind of machine, he’s a person, he’s just got an interesting kind of brain.

Ben doesn’t even blink when Chris anxiously reels off the letters in a low voice.

“Oh,” Ben says, nodding thoughtfully. “Well, mystery solved.”

Chris had no idea other people had noticed that there was a mystery at all, and he laughs, relieved. “You don’t mind?”

Ben shakes his head, exasperated. “Chris, I hate to break it to you, but nothing’s changed. You have words for these things now, but they’ve been around since forever.”

“That’s true,” Chris says, and that’s what he tries to tell the others, to tell Ann.

They nod, and nothing changes in any fundamental way, there’s just more knowledge, and Chris is able to look back on his life, on the things he did, the things he does, with this knowledge. It’s a weight off his shoulders.

It takes time, but it turns out that the fact that he’s not normal means he’s not supposed to have a normal life. He doesn’t need one. He never even wanted one.

He just needed a life, and people in it.

Chris is lucky. Besides amazing friends and amazing children, he has soulmates, people who are always there for him, who clicked with him in a way that has made them part of him.

Ben’s one kind of soulmate. A constant, just as Chris is a constant for him. He always sticks around, even when they’re apart. He’s there for as long as they have, and even when they’re not even colleagues anymore, it doesn’t matter, because they’re friends. More than friends. It turns out that Chris is Ben’s one-kind-of-soulmate too, and Leslie is Ben’s other-kind-of-soulmate.

Chris has another kind of soulmate too, and he was exactly right on who she turned out to be.

Ann Perkins.

It was still a pleasant surprise when it turned out he was her soulmate too. Every time he remembers she’s here and she’s with him and they’re in love with each other it’s a pleasant surprise.

Chris never does get married.

But what he gets is so much better.

**2000: Coda**

“You’re the human, I’m the robot,” Ben says like he’s stating a fact.

Chris wrinkles his nose. “That doesn’t make very much sense.”

Ben turns to look at him, frowning. Ben spends a lot of his time frowning. “Why not?”

“You’re not a robot, and I’ve always been the robot,” Chris admits. “Everyone’s always called me that.”

Ben snorts. “Are you kidding me?”

“No,” Chris says, confused. “Why would I be?”

“I was—never mind. But why would people call _you_ a robot? You have feelings.”

“You have feelings too, Ben,” Chris reminds him. “I’ve seen you have feelings. But I think it’s because I exercise so much and don’t get tired very easily. I have a body that just won’t quit.”

Ben snorts in what sounds like amusement and then asks, “Because your body’s a microchip?”

“Right! At least when I was younger, people called me a robot all the time. A cyborg’s a robot, right?”

“Uh, sort of. Like half robot and half person.”

“Oh, okay. Then I guess I was mostly half-robot.”

“Sure. Kids called you that?”

“Oh, they called me a lot of things. They were wonderful, but sometimes they didn’t have much of an imagination.”

“I got called a robot when I was kid too. But it was less like a robot body and more like a robot brain.”

Chris hums in understanding. “I think…” he starts, and then hesitates before admitting, “…sometimes they meant that I was just fully a robot. Not just in body, but in mind too. Because I wasn’t always very good at understanding them.”

“I never even tried.”

“Oh,” Chris murmurs thoughtfully. “I never would’ve dreamed of that.”

“See?” Ben says. “That’s why you’re not a robot.”

“You’re the first person to ever tell me that.”

“Good Lord, seriously?”

“Mhm,” Chris says, flipping to the next page of his book.

“Huh. You’re the first person to ever tell me I’m not a robot either.”

“I guess we won’t be robots together.”

Ben chuckles. “Deal.”

**Author's Note:**

> \- It took me a while to find and research a blood disorder that could at least somewhat realistically be the one Chris has/had. What he has/had in this fic is TTP (thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura), which is a rare blood disorder that manifests by blood clotting into small blood vessels through the body.  
> \- Thrombotic is referring to the blood clots that form.  
> \- Thrombocytopenic means that the blood has a lower platelet count than it should. (Platelets are the blood cell fragments that help blood clot.)  
> \- Purpura refers to the bruises that form under the skin because of bleeding under the skin. Sometimes they can look like lesions, which is what Chris means by the “raised patches”.  
> \- The ‘red freckles’ refer to petechiae, which look like red or purple pinpricks under the skin (unless they’re all together in a rash, which is called a petechial rash and looks more like a patch), also from bleeding under the skin.
> 
> Chris has childhood-onset TTP and is really, incredibly lucky to be alive. (Again, I’m not a medical professional and this was basically the most accurate I could get when it came to the blood disorder.) 
> 
> As a child, Chris has two major, life threatening relapses (flare-ups), one when he’s four and one when he’s six (that’s where we start off the fic). Then he goes into remission for quite a bit, and he the three flare-ups that he mentioned, but other than that he's pretty recovered. It really is incredibly rare that that would happen with childhood TTP (honestly, it’s miraculous that Chris lived so long being treated for TTP in the late sixties and early seventies, apparently there was a really good hematology expert in this random hospital in Wisconsin), but it fits with Chris’s characterization as a miracle baby/child, and it also fits with the amount of care Chris takes with his health.
> 
> Chris’s surgery was to remove his spleen, which is a pretty last ditch effort to cure TTP, and I don’t think it’s generally done on children, but I think it was relatively accurate considering the time.
> 
> \- Remember that Chris grew up in the seventies and early eighties, whereas Ben mostly grew up in the eighties and early nineties.
> 
> \- Chris has orthorexia nervosa, an eating disorder characterized with an obsession with eating healthy food to the point where it’s detrimental in day to day life.
> 
> \- Chris dissociates a lot.
> 
> \- Chris started school two years after most kids do because of his health issues. That is, he started kindergarten at seven, when most kids are either finishing first grade or starting second grade. That’s why he graduates high school at twenty. This would have been a bit more common in the seventies. Chris, as a Certified Public Accountant, presumably has a B.S. and an M.A. 
> 
> \- Ben fast-tracked his way through college and grad school and thus graduated at twenty-three. 
> 
> \- Chris actually got laid off from his job at a dot-com a year before the dot-com boom (closely followed by the dot-com bust). This is largely just because I wouldn’t have been able to have him work at a dot-com during the boom and still fit with the timeline, and I really wanted him to work at a dot-com.
> 
> \- Chris and Ben are not state auditors, they are government auditors working for the state. A state auditor is either an elected position or a position appointed by the state senate. It was pretty unrealistic for Ben and Chris to be actual state auditors (considering what they do in their jobs, how long they’ve been at it, and the fact that they were able to so quickly change jobs), so I changed it a bit.


End file.
